Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 April 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Silicon Valley Fellowship Program Reached Successful Conclusion

22 April 2011 | The 40th ICANN Public meeting marked the 12th round of the ICANN Fellowship Program.

Current State of the UDRP Webinar Announcement

21 April 2011 | You are invited to participate in a webinar on the current state of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). The ICANN Policy Staff is holding this Webinar on Tuesday 10 May at 15:00 UTC.

Call for Community Volunteers for IDN Variant TLD Case Study Teams

20 April 2011 | The ICANN community seeks to develop solutions to enable the delegation of Variant TLDs for the benefit of users around the world. After consultation with the community, today ICANN outlines its approach to move forward by publishing the Final Proposal for the IDN Variant TLDs Issues Project and the Call for Volunteers.

Upcoming Events

19 - 24 June 2011: 41st International Public ICANN Meeting - Singapore

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."