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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 27 February 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Proposed Registrar Disqualification Procedure

27 February 2009 | ICANN has developed a draft, proposed Registrar Disqualification Procedure (available at: http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/draft-disqualification-procedure-27feb09-en.pdf [PDF, 124 KB]) to codify its procedures for registrar disqualification. This proposed procedure is intended to enhance protection of registrants by preventing potential bad actors from causing repeated harm to registrants and other stakeholders in the domain name space.

Improving Institutional Confidence Plan Published

27 February 2009 | The results of a lengthy community consultation to improve institutional confidence in ICANN have been published for discussion at the Mexico City meeting.

ICANN Publishes 2009 Semi-Annual Contractual Compliance Report

27 February 2009 | ICANN's Contractual Compliance Department published its third Semi-Annual Contractual Compliance Report.

New gTLDs: Call for Applicant Evaluation Panel Expressions of Interest

25 February 2009 | ICANN is soliciting Expressions of Interest from firms interested in and capable of performing any number of independent evaluation roles as part of the new gTLD process.

RSSAC Review: Independent Consultants' Report and Public Comment Period

24 February 2009 | Westlake Consulting just released their draft Final Report for public presentation and discussion with the community, including at the Mexico City meeting.

Mexico Meeting Goes Mobile

23 February 2009 | The Mexico City meeting is now accessible on your phone.

Upcoming Events

1 - 6 March 2009: 34rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Mexico City, Mexico

19 March 2009: CENTR General Assembly - Barcelona, Spain

13 - 17 April 2009: AfTLD Meeting - Arusha, Tanzania

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Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 KB]

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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."