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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 25 March 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN's Response to the US Department of Commerce's Request for Comments on the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Functions [PDF, 446 KB]

25 March 2011 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers welcomes the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) request for public comment on potential enhancements to the performance of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.

Community Comment Opportunity Extended on: Proposed "Process for Recognition of New GNSO Constituencies"

20 March 2011 | The ICANN Board is working to improve the process for evaluating new GNSO Constituency proposals by streamlining the procedures and according a larger role to community Stakeholder Groups. At the direction of the Board, ICANN Staff opened a 30-day public consultation forum, from 2 February through 4 March 2011. The Board has now extended the period for that forum until April 3, 2011 .


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

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."