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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 26 November 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Proposed Changes to Enhance ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Evaluation Process

22 November 2010 | The community is invited to provide comments on proposed measures to enhance ICANN's registrar accreditation evaluation process. Specifically, ICANN is seeking public comment on a proposed set of terms and conditions for the registrar accreditation application; the scope of additional proposed due diligence checks; a proposed increase to the registrar accreditation application fee as a consequence of the need for ICANN to conduct additional information searches to support the additional due diligence checks.

Public Comment: Interim Paper on Issues and Possible Solutions Inclusion of IDN ccTLD's in the ccNSO

22 November 2010 | The IDN country code policy development process Working Group 2 (IDN ccPDP WG 2) seeks input from the community on its work to date, on developing recommendations for the inclusion of IDN country code Top Level Domain managers in the country code Names Supporting Organization.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

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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."