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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 20 February 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Board Review: Interim Report Published

20 February 2009 | ICANN appointed the Boston Consulting Group/Colin Carter & Associates to perform the external review of its Board of Directors.

Draft Applicant Guidebook: What Tou Told Us

18 February 2009 | A second draft of an Applicant Guidebook that details the process of applying for new generic top level domains was released today along with a detailed analysis of comments received so far.

Public Comment: Geographic Regions Charter

18 February 2009 | A community-wide working group has been established by the ICANN Board to undertake a review of ICANN's Geographic Regions. The Working Group has developed a draft charter to guide its efforts.

Public Comment: Fast Track Proposed Solutions

18 February 2009 | A public comment period opened on a number of proposed implementation features in the "Fast Track" process, as well as an updated version of the Fast Track's Implementation Plan.

Your Input Required for Operating Plan and Budget Framework - Fiscal Year 2010

17 February 2009 | The release of ICANN's Proposed Framework for the Fiscal Year 2010 (FY10) Operating Plan and Budget kicks off the operational planning process for ICANN, providing the community the first look at the planned work and financial resources required for FY10.

SSAC Review: Independent Consultants' Report

17 February 2009 | JAS Communications just released their draft Final Report for public presentation and discussion at the Mexico City meeting.

Upcoming Events

23 - 24 February 2009: APTLD - Manila, The Philippines

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

19 March 2009: CENTR General Assembly - Barcelona, Spain

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."