Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 23 November 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

— No announcements this week —

ICANN in the News

These links lead to external news stories. ICANN is not responsible for the content of these pages.

ICANN Speeds IDN ccTLDs (The Register)

16 November 2007 | The likes of China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are on the fast track to net domains that use their very own alphabets.

ICANN Featured Individual: Pearl Liang, IANA Project Specialist

Pearl Liang joined the ICANN staff as an IANA Project Assistant in November 2004. Her previous experience includes an extensive background in registry and registrar operations, including both ccTLD and gTLD registries.

Pearl holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Hawaii Pacific University in the United States, and a Diploma in International Trade from Ming Chuan College in Taiwan.

Upcoming Events

2 - 7 December 2007 - 70th IETF - Vancouver, Canada

3 - 6 December 2007 - ITU Telecom Europe 2007 - Sofia, Bulgaria

10 February - 15 February 2008: 31st International Public ICANN Meeting - New Delhi, India

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, July 2007 - June 2010

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008

Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008 [PDF, 426 KB]

Sign up for ICANN's Monthly Magazine

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please visit http://www.icann.org/newsletter

If you have questions or comments about this mailing list, send an email to ICANN-Newsletter@icann.org

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."