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A Conversation with Members of the Second Security, Stability and Resiliency of the Domain Name System (DNS) Review Team (SSR2)

By James Gannon and Kerry-Ann Barrett | 26 May 2017

  • A look back: The ICANN History Project

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    Brad White interviews Peter Dengate-Thrush It was indeed ironic–Ira Magaziner's boss, President Bill Clinton, had just won his 1996 bid for re-election, yet Magaziner was feeling the pain of defeat. As a Senior Policy Advisor to the President, Magaziner had been heavily...

  • Clarifying the Roles of the ICANN Complaints Office and Ombudsman

    Last month, the ICANN organization officially launched its Complaints Office, which serves a complimentary role to ICANN’s existing complaints processes, such as Contractual Compliance, Request for Reconsideration and the Ombudsman. However, we have noticed some confusion...

  • A New Perspective on the Stakeholder's Journey

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    Photo: Catching up with the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy (APIGA) alumni at the recent ICANN meeting in Copenhagen (From left to right: Mohammad Abdul Awal from Bangladesh, Haoran Huang from China, Adeel Sadiq from Pakistan, Donggi Lee from South Korea and...

  • The Fellowship Spirit

    Part Two of a Four-Part Blog Series (Read Part One) FY18 Budget and Fellowship … is that a weird way to start this second blog on the Fellowship spirit? As the ICANN community, organization and Board prepare to finalize the budget for the next fiscal year, the Fellowship...

  • Fellow or NextGen? Explore Your Options

    Did you know that ICANN has two programs aimed at bringing people to ICANN Public Meetings? Are you interested in: The future of the Internet and how it is governed? How to develop regional and global Internet policy? How to approach technical and security challenges? If...

  • M3AAWG Appoints Dr. John Levine Liaison to ICANN

    The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) recently appointed Dr. John Levine Liaison to ICANN. The ICANN organization welcomes this appointment and thanks M3AAWG's Board of Directors for this decision. This appointment will allow the portion of...

  • Complaints Office Update: Objectives & Next Steps

    Recently, I was appointed ICANN’s first-ever Complaints Officer. I am honored to have been selected, and excited to build out this important new role. The Complaints Office is being built to help the ICANN Organization with its effectiveness and to provide additional...

  • What is New with ICANN Reviews?

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    "What is New with ICANN Reviews?" is also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish languages. ICANN's Bylaws require that ICANN conduct regular reviews across the organization and on specific subject areas. These are an important part of...

  • 6th Registration Operations Workshop (ROW), Madrid, 12 May 2017

    TheRegistration Operations Workshop (ROW) was conceived as an informal industry conference aimed at providing a forum for discussing the technical aspects of registration operations in the Domain Name System (DNS). The sixth ROW will be held in Madrid, Spain, on Friday,...

  • Upcoming ICANN Technical Events in Madrid in May 2017

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    Here in the Office of the CTO (OCTO), we're busy getting ready for several technically themed events coming up in Madrid, Spain, in May. 12 May Identifier Technology Health Indicators (ITHI) workshop 12 May Registry Operations Workshop (ROW) 13 May ICANN Domain Name...

  • Q&A: What the Retirement of Google Site Search Means for ICANN

    ICANN’s Community Collaboration Services team provides digital services to the ICANN community, which includes the ICANN organization and community websites. Google recently announced a change in direction that affects the entire ICANN website ecosystem. As director of...

  • Elise Gerich to Leave ICANN After Seven Years of Service

    I want to let you know that Elise Gerich has decided to step down from her role at ICANN as Vice President, IANA Services and President, Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) in October 2017. Until she leaves, Gerich will continue to oversee the IANA department and PTI, and...

  • Improving Contractual Compliance

    About ten days ago, members of the Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG) and the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) submitted a document entitled, “Joint Recommendations for ICANN Compliance.” A few months into my new role leading Contractual Compliance and Consumer...

  • President's Corner: Catching up with Stakeholders

    It was great to see so many of you in person during ICANN58 in Copenhagen. With more than 2,500 registered attendees, and more than 300 sessions, we were all very busy, and I thank you all for your hard work and focus. I also want to thank our generous hosts from...

  • Community Anti-Harassment Policy

    The ICANN Board unanimous passed a resolution at ICANN58, effectively putting into place the new ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy that not only supports ICANN’s Expected Standards of Behavior, but now gives community members recourse if they identify or are victims...

  • Ways of Trusting Internet Identifiers

    Recent news that Google's Chrome browser is going to trust Symantec-issued transport layer security (TLS) certificates less than those from other certificate authorities (CAs) has reignited debates about how trust is expressed to Internet users. Certificates for TLS are...

  • The Three Pillars of ICANN’s Technical Engagement Strategy

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    ICANN's technical engagement team was established two years ago. Since then, we have made a great deal of progress in better engaging with our peers throughout the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship transition proposal process and currently during the...

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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."