Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 17 April 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Jobs Website Goes Live

17 April 2009 | A new careers website for ICANN has gone live, providing those interested in working for the organization with a simple and effective way to view current vacancies as well as apply for jobs online.

Community Comment Invited on Petition To Form A New GNSO Consumers Constituency

15 April 2009 | The ongoing GNSO Improvements process has created significant community interest in the formation of new GNSO constituencies and several groups have stepped forward to begin the process of forming a new GNSO constituency. The ICANN Board has now received its second formal petition - from the prospective Consumers Constituency.

Initiation of IDN ccPDP by ccNSO Council

13 April 2009 | The purpose of the IDN ccPDP is to develop and recommend to the ICANN Board a policy for the selection and delegation of IDN ccTLDs and identify, and if any recommend such, changes needed to Article IX and annexes in connection with such policy. The IDN ccPDP Issue Report, including the PDP timeline is available here [PDF, 109 KB].


Upcoming Events

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

21 - 26 June 2009: 35th International Public ICANN Meeting - Sydney, Australia


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]


Sign up for ICANN's Monthly Magazine

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."