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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 June 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Changes to New GTLD Program Management

21 June 2012 | Kurt Pritz has been appointed to take on direct oversight of the entire New Generic Top-level Domain Program in an interim capacity.

Security, Stability & Resiliency of the DNS Review Team (SSR RT) Final Report

21 June 2012 | The Security, Stability & Resiliency of the DNS Review Team (SSR RT) submitted its Final Report and Recommendations to the ICANN Board, and public comments are requested to inform subsequent Board consideration and action.

Period of 21 June – 01 July 2012: Public Comment Periods Approaching Closing Date

21 June 2012 | The Following Public Comment periods are approaching their Comment or Reply Period Close dates, 21 June – 01 July 2012.

IDN ccTLD Request From Mongolia Successfully Passes String Evaluation

20 June 2012 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Mongolia.

Next CEO to be Announced at Prague News Conference

18 June 2012 | Board Chairman Dr. Stephen Crocker will introduce the next President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at a news conference on Friday, 22 June in Prague, Czech Republic.

ICANN Relocates Offices in Brussels, Los Angeles

18 June 2012 | ICANN staff in Brussels, Belgium, and Los Angeles, California, took a break from unpacking moving boxes to share a virtual toast with colleagues in Silicon Valley, California, and Washington D.C.

Call for Volunteers: Developing the Process for Root IDN Table Creation and Maintenance

18 June 2012 | ICANN is seeking volunteers to work on advancing IDN capabilities in the DNS.

Upcoming Events

24 - 29 June 2012: 44th International Public ICANN Meeting - Prague

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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."