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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 18 July 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN's gTLD Registry Failover Plan

15 July 2008 | Following extensive collaboration and consultation with experienced gTLD registries, ccTLD managers, SSAC, and other members of the community, ICANN announced the implementable version of the gTLD Registry Failover Plan [PDF, 85 KB] during the ICANN Public Forum in Paris, France on 25 June 2008. ICANN has now posted the plan for public comment. Comments on the plan may be submitted to registry-failover-plan@icann.org through 14 August 2008 23:59 UTC and may be viewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/registry-failover-plan/.

Public Comments Requested on the Newly Proposed ICANN Board of Director's Code of Conduct

15 July 2008 | Public comments on ICANN Board of Directors' Code of Conduct [PDF, 25 KB] are encouraged to be submitted by 29 August 2008 via email to bcoc@icann.org. An archive of all comments received will be publicly posted at http://forum.icann.org/lists/bcoc.

Comments Encouraged on the Final Report of IDNC Working Group on ccTLD "Fast Track" Mechanisms

15 July 2008 | Deadline and How To Submit Comments: The Public Comment forum on the Final Report of the IDNC WG will be open through 15 August 2008. Comments on the document are welcome via email to idn-cctld-fast-track@icann.org. An archive of all comments received will be publicly posted at http://forum.icann.org/lists/idn-cctld-fast-track/.

ICANN Policy Issue Briefs Now Available in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian

14 July 2008 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced the availability of Arabic, Chinese, and Russian versions of ICANN Policy Issue Briefs in furtherance of ICANN's internationalization efforts.

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2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt

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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."