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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 18 July 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Los Angeles Fellowship Participants Selected

18 July 2014 | 50 fellows from 38 countries have been selected to participate in ICANN's Fellowship program at the 51st Public Meeting in Los Angeles, 12-16 October 2014.

Request for Proposal for Global Consumer Survey

16 July 2014 | ICANN is seeking one or more providers to conduct a global survey assessing aspects of consumer trust and perceived consumer choice and the Internet domain name system (DNS).

IANA Functions Stewardship Transition Updates

16 July 2014 | The first face-to-face meeting of the ICG was held in London from 08:00-17:00 UTC on 17-18 July at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel. The meeting was streamed live in seven languages and participation was available through a Virtual Meeting Room. Transcripts of these recordings are available.

Fraudulent ICANN Domain Name Certificates

15 July 2014 | It has been brought to ICANN's attention that some online entities have attempted to sell fraudulent "certificates", which they claim are required to protect generic top-level domain names.

Upcoming Events

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

About ICANN

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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."