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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 16 November 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

REMINDER - Accountability & Transparency Review Team 2 (ATRT 2): Call for Volunteer ATRT Members: Representing ICANN Advisory Committees and Supporting Organizations; and Serving as Independent Experts

14 November 2012 | In accordance with the AoC timeframe, ICANN now invites interested individuals to apply for a position of Volunteer Review Team Member, representing a Supporting Organization or Advisory Committee, or for position of Independent Expert on the second Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT 2).

Preliminary Issue Report on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part D

14 November 2012 | As a required step in the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Development Process (PDP), ICANN Staff is seeking input on the Preliminary Issue Report on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy Part D.

Pre-Delegation Testing Provider for New gTLDs - RFP Questions & Answers

12 November 2012 | Respondents are requested to respond to the Request For Proposals by replying to pre-delegation-testing-bid@icann.org. The period to submit questions about the RFP is now closed. The final response to the RFP is due on 20 November 2012.

Upcoming Events

7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."