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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 21 June 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Proposed Renewal of .ORG gTLD Registry Agreement

21 June 2013 | ICANN is posting today for public comment the proposed renewal of the 2008 .ORG Registry Agreement.

Thick Whois Initial Report – GNSO Policy Development Process

21 June 2013 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization ("GNSO") Thick Whois Policy Development Process Working Group tasked with providing the GNSO Council with a policy recommendation regarding the use of 'thick' Whois by all gTLD Registries has published its Initial Report for public comment.

Whois Registrant Identification Study Published

19 June 2013 | 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.

ICANN Signs an Exchange of Letters with ccTLD Manager for Montenegro (.ME)

17 June 2013 | ICANN has announced today that it has signed an Accountability Framework with the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) manager for .ME (Montenegro), the Ministry for Information Society and Telecommunications of Montenegro, on 13 May 2013.

Upcoming Events

14 - 18 July 2013: 47th International Public ICANN Meeting - Durban

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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."