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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 January 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

New gTLD Draft Applicant Guidebook Update

9 January 2009 | The comment period received over 300 comments from participants from 24 different countries. Among the many participants were individuals and organizations representing intellectual property interests, brand owners, business owners, ICANN supporting organizations, domain name industry players, and governments.

Help Build The New GNSO

9 January 2009 | The GNSO is creating five new Work Teams to be the incubators through which implementation plans for ICANN Board approved GNSO improvement recommendations can be developed and proposed by members of the ICANN community. Each Work Team will be made up of community volunteers who have interest in and expertise in one of five main focus areas.

Public Comment: Initial Report on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (Part A)

9 January 2009 | A public comment period opens today for 21 days on an Initial Report into the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP).

Participate In Improving the GNSO

8 January 2009 | Now is an excellent time for interested individuals/entities to become engaged in this critically important work.

Upcoming Events

1 - 6 March 2009: 34rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Mexico City, Mexico

13 - 17 April 2009: AfTLD Meeting - Arusha, Tanzania

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 KB]

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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."