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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 29 January 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

To 4,294,967,296 and Beyond – Under 10% of IPv4 Space Remains: Adoption of IPv6 Is Essential

29 January 2010 | It has long been anticipated, but the available pool of unallocated Internet addresses using the older IPv4 protocol – which holds a total of slightly more than four billion IP addresses - has now dipped to below the 10 percent mark, meaning that there are only a bit over 400 million IP addresses left in the global pool of unallocated addresses.

Public Comment: Amendment of the GNSO Operating Procedures on the 2010 Selection Process for ICANN Board Seat 13

28 January 2010 | The GNSO Council is seeking comments on amendments to the GNSO Operating Procedures related to the 2010 selection process for ICANN Board Seat 13.

DNSSEC Deployment in Root Zone of DNS Begins at ICANN

27 January 2010 | DNSSEC information is now being served by L-Root, one of the Internet's 13 root servers, operated by ICANN.

Upcoming Events

7 - 12 March 2010: 37th International Public ICANN Meeting - Nairobi, Kenya

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

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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."