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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 June 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Introduction of Two-Character Domain Names in the New gTLD Namespace

12 June 2014 | Six (6) Registry Services Evaluation Process (RSEP) requests were submitted by the registry operators listed below to allow the introduction of two-character domain names in the New gTLD namespace. In total, the requests concern 148 New gTLDs.

Announcing Plans for Public Comment Improvements

12 June 2014 | ICANN's Policy Development Support Staff recently assumed day-to-day oversight of ICANN's public comment infrastructure. This responsibility includes coordinating, evaluating, developing and implementing targeted improvements to all of ICANN's community input and feedback mechanisms.

.PARIS - Introduction of Approved Launch Program

12 June 2014 | The City of Paris' application for an Approved Launch Program pursuant to Section 4.5.2 of the Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements (the "TMCH Requirements") is being posted for comment to give the community an opportunity to review and provide feedback.

Public Comment Invited: .NGO and .ONG Registry Services Evaluation Process Request – Introduction of Technical Bundling

10 June 2014 | Public Interest Registry, the registry operator for .NGO and .ONG TLDs, submitted a request to provide a new registry service to offer support for mandatory technical bundling of second level domains for .NGO and .ONG.

Final "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions Phase One" Report Published

10 June 2014 | ICANN today announced the publication of the final "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions Phase One" report by JAS Global Advisors ("JAS").

Civil Society at ICANN: Everything You Need to Know About the ICANN Meeting in London

10 June 2014 | Please join ICANN Vice Presidents Christopher Mondini and Nora Abusitta for a pre-ICANN 50 webinar for civil society participants.

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."