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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 7 December 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Root Zone Scaling Measurements at L-Root

7 December 2012 | ICANN is the operator of L-Root, one of the thirteen root servers in the Domain Name System (DNS). To better be able to identify any performance impact on L-Root caused by a larger root zone, work is underway to implement additional instrumentation of L-Root's infrastructure.

WHOIS Privacy and Proxy Survey Final Report Published

7 December 2012 | In response to requests from the GNSO Council to gather data to inform future WHOIS policy development activities, ICANN has commissioned a series of studies to evaluate different aspects of WHOIS. The WHOIS Privacy and Proxy Relay/Reveal Final Report, prepared by the Interisle Consulting Group in Boston, MA, USA, is the first of these studies to be published by ICANN.

IDN Variant TLD Program – Procedure to Develop and Maintain the Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone in Respect of IDNA Labels – Second Public Comment Draft

7 December 2012 | The Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant TLD Program deals with the variant form of top-level domain (TLD) names in different scripts. To enable IDN Variant TLDs in the root, it is necessary to establish the Label Generation Rules (LGR) for the DNS Root Zone.

EXTENSION OF DEADLINE - Accountability & Transparency Review Team 2 (ATRT 2): Call for Volunteer ATRT Members: Representing ICANN Advisory Committees and Supporting Organizations; and Serving as Independent Experts

3 December 2012 | In accordance with the AoC timeframe, ICANN now invites interested individuals to apply for a position of Volunteer Review Team Member, representing a Supporting Organization or Advisory Committee, or for position of Independent Expert on the second Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT 2).

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7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

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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."