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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 31 May 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Bulk Transfer of Domain Names from C I Host, Central Registrar, Power Brand Center, and Dotted Ventures to Astutium Limited

31 May 2013 | ICANN has authorized the bulk transfer of gTLD domain names from three registrars: C I Host, Inc., Central Registrar, Inc. DBA Domainmonger.com, Power Brand Center Corp. to Astutium Limited due to compliance actions taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of registrars C I Host, Central Registrar and Power Brand Center.

NomCom Receives Largest Number of Applicants Since 2003

31 May 2013 | The 2013 Nominating Committee application period closed on Wednesday, 15 May 2013 at 23:59 UTC. At the deadline, the NomCom had received 110 Statements of Interest, more than in any one year after 2003, when there were also 110.

Security Studies on the Use of Non-Delegated TLDs, and Dotless Names

28 May 2013 | ICANN is announcing two studies regarding: 1) the use of non-delegated TLDs and 2) potential risks related to dotless domain names.

Upcoming Events

14 - 18 July 2013: 47th International Public ICANN Meeting - Durban

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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."