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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 24 January 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

BCG Study: Countries that Expand Internet Access and Use Can Spur Digital Economy Growth

24 January 2014 | Greasing the Wheels of the Internet Economy is a new report by Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by ICANN. The report takes a look at Internet access and use around the world, and the economic importance of an open single Internet.

WEBINAR: ICANN Strategy Panel on ICANN Multistakeholder Innovation

23 January 2014 | You are invited to an update on the activities of the Strategy Panel on ICANN Multistakeholder Innovation. The work of the ICANN Strategy Panels will inform ICANN's new, overarching vision and five-year strategic plan.

Largest Domain Name Expansion in Internet's History Reaches Benchmark

21 January 2014 | Los Angeles, California… ICANN's Global Domains Division today announced that the number of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) delegated into the Internet's Root Zone has topped 100.

Review of Trusted Community Representation in Root Zone DNSSEC Key Signing Ceremonies

21 January 2014 | Based on feedback from the current TCRs and our experience from the first 14 ceremonies, we are reviewing what changes, if any, should be made to the current model of Trusted Community Representative participation.

Upcoming Events

23-27 March 2014: 49th International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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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."