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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 July 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Formation of the Coordination Group

3 July 2014 | On 14 March 2014, the NTIA announced its intention to transition its stewardship role of IANA functions, and called upon ICANN to launch and facilitate a process with the community to derive a proposal to transition the IANA functions to the global multistakeholder community, meeting the criteria set out by NTIA.

Policy Implementation Updates

2 July 2014 | ICANN announces the implementation of two new consensus policy initiatives: the Additional Whois Information Policy (AWIP) and amendments to the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) related to domain name unlocking.

Call for Expressions of Interest for 2015 | Nominating Committee Chair and Chair-Elect

1 July 2014 | ICANN EXTENDS TIME TO SUBMIT EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST THROUGH 15 JULY 2014

ICANN Adds Global Coordination Role to Support Government Engagement

1 July 2014 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that it has promoted Mandy Carver to the newly created position of VP, Government Engagement, Global Coordination.

Upcoming Events

12-16 October 2014: 51st International Public ICANN Meeting – Los Angeles

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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."