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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 29 October 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Slate of Three Candidates Selected for Position of the At-Large Selected Voting Board Director

29 October 2010 | The At-Large Board Candidate Evaluation Committee (BCEC) recently announced the slate of three candidates for the position of At-Large selected voting Board Director.

ICANN Ombudsman Announces Departure

28 October 2010 | Frank Fowlie has announced that he will be leaving his position as Ombudsman for ICANN effective on or before 31 January 2011.

Audited Financial Statements Posted

27 October 2010 | ICANN's FY10 Audited Financials are now posted.

TLG Review – Independent External Reviewers' Draft Report for Public Comment

23 October 2010 | JAS Communications LLC has delivered their draft report with recommendations and conclusions based on their independent research and interviews conducted. The draft report is now released for consultation and public comment.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

About ICANN

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Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."