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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 29 April 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Translations of the April 2011 Discussion Draft of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook Are Available

29 April 2011 | ICANN posted the translations today for public comment on the April 2011 Discussion Draft of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook in the 5 UN languages.

Global Policy Proposal for Post Exhaustion IPv4 Allocation Mechanisms by IANA – Background Report, 25 April 2011

26 April 2011 | Third proposal for handling recovered IPv4 address space.

Location Recommendations Now Being Accepted for ICANN's 2013 Meetings in Asia/Australia/Pacific, Africa and Latin America/Caribbean

25 April 2011 | ICANN is actively seeking locations for its three public meetings to be held 7-12 April 2013 in Asia Pacific, 14-19 July 2013 in Africa, and 17-22 November 2013 in Latin America.

Public Comment: Proposed .MOBI Contract Amendment "Additional Equitable Allocation Options for .MOBI One and Two-Character Domains"

25 April 2011 | ICANN is opening a public comment period on a proposed amendment from mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd. to Appendices 6 and 7 of the .MOBI Registry Agreement.

Upcoming Events

19 - 24 June 2011: 41st International Public ICANN Meeting - Singapore

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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."