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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 30 September 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Geographic Regions Review – Draft Final Report

30 September 2011 | The Draft Final Report outlines specific recommendations from the Working Group to the ICANN Board regarding how the present Geographic Regions Framework can be modified to ensure that the organizational principles of geographic and cultural diversity are honored and maintained. Mindful of the potential implications even small changes to the framework could have on the wider community, the WG decided to make this draft document available to the community for review and comment before the WG formally publishes its Final Report.

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN International Public Meeting 43 in San Jose, Costa Rica

30 September 2011 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is now accepting online applications for the 15th round of the Fellowship program. Successful candidates will participate in the ICANN meeting to be held in San Jose, Costa Rica from 11-16 March 2012.

The Initial Comment Period for "Phase II of Public Comments Process Enhancements" Ends on 30 September 2011

30 September 2011 | As an initial test of the "Reply Cycle" concept introduced within this solicitation, the comment forum on this topic will be extended for an additional 15 days (15 October).

NORC at the University of Chicago Selected to Conduct a gTLD Whois Registrant Identification Study

28 September 2011 | ICANN has engaged NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct a gTLD Whois Registrant Identification study, seeking a foundational understanding of the types of entities and kinds of potentially commercial activities observed among gTLD domain names.

Beckstrom Points to Multi-stakeholder Model as "Catalyst for the Internet" [PDF, 306 KB]

27 September 2011 | Rod Beckstrom, CEO and President of ICANN, has called on the world community to speak up in defense of the multi-stakeholder model that has served as the "catalyst for the Internet."

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23 - 28 October 2011: 42nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Dakar

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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."