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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 30 May 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Registrars Stakeholder Group (RrSG) Charter Revisions (May 2014)

30 May 2014 | In March 2014, the Registrars Stakeholder Group (RrSG) submitted a set of Charter revisions to the Staff for processing in compliance with Phase I of the Process For Amending GNSO Stakeholder Group and Constituency Charters.

Pre-ICANN 50 Policy Update Webinar

30 May 2014 | The ICANN Policy Development Support Team will provide a Policy Update Webinar on Thursday 12 June at 10:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC, summarizing policy activities across the ICANN policy development community including the ongoing Transition of Stewardship of the IANA Functions, ICANN Accountability, and Cross-Community efforts.

One-Week Extension to the Public Comment and Reply Periods on Enhancing ICANN Accountability Process

29 May 2014 | In response to ensuring the community has sufficient time, while also having the process in parallel to, and informing, the process to Transition NTIA's Stewardship of the IANA Functions, there is a one (1) week extension of the comment period to 6 June.

ICANN Registrar Contact Information Database (RADAR) Password Reset

28 May 2014 | ICANN has taken its registrar contact information database (RADAR) offline temporarily. This action was taken as a precautionary measure after it was learned that an unauthorized party viewed data in the system. ICANN has found no evidence of any unauthorized changes to the data in the system.

DNS Risk Assessment (1st Iteration) for Public Consultation

28 May 2014 | In November 2013 at ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires, the ICANN Board adopted the ICANN DNS Risk Management Framework ("Framework") and in February 2014 a group of selected ICANN staff undertook an initial (limited scope) DNS risk assessment using the Framework.


Upcoming Events

22-26 June 2014: 50th International Public ICANN Meeting – London

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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."