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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 21 January 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN's Board and GAC to Meet on New gTLDs

21 January 2011 | During the recent ICANN meeting in Cartagena, the ICANN Board of Directors and Governmental Advisory Committee agreed to meet at some time prior to the upcoming Silicon Valley/San Francisco meeting in order to devote significant time in the interest of resolving the outstanding issues the GAC has identified with the new gTLD process. The Board and the GAC have agreed to meet on 28 February and 1 March 2011, in Brussels.

Public Comment: GNSO Council Requests Your Input on Proposed GNSO Working Group Guidelines

18 January 2011 | As part of the GNSO Improvements Process, which has as its objective to improve the structure and operations of the GNSO, the Policy Process Steering Committee has now submitted to the GNSO Council the proposed GNSO Working Group Guidelines. Prior to considering the proposed GNSO Working Group Guidelines, the GNSO Council is seeking your input.

Upcoming Events

13 - 18 March 2011: 40th International Public ICANN Meeting - San Francisco, CA, USA

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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."