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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 21 May 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Meetings for the Next Decade Consultation Process Opens

21 May 2010 | ICANN is pleased to announce the beginning of Stage One of the "Meetings for the Next Decade" consultation process.

Proposals Sought to Provide Costs and Feasibility to Conduct WHOIS Privacy and Proxy Abuse Study

18 May 2010 | The GNSO Council is now exploring several extensive studies of WHOIS and has asked ICANN to estimate the cost and feasibility of conducting several studies proposed by members of the ICANN community and ICANN's Government Advisory Committee. ICANN is seeking to engage independent research organizations to undertake this study.

Public Comments Opens Today: Questions to the Community on Accountability and Transparency within ICANN

18 May 2010 | The AoC Accountability and Transparency Review Team would also like to understand if there are new inputs or changes in stakeholder views since the establishment of the AoC.

Public Comment: Draft FY11 Operating Plan and Budget...Ready for Community Consideration

17 May 2010 | The draft FY11 Operating Plan and Budget is posted and ready for community consideration.

IANA Continuity Exercise Report Published

17 May 2010 | ICANN is releasing the After Action Report from the IANA Business Continuity Exercise conducted on 19 January 2010. The exercise was discussed during the ICANN Nairobi meeting.

Upcoming Events

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY10 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."