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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 21 November 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

IANA Stewardship Transition Cross Community Working Group (CWG) on Naming Related Functions

20 November 2014 | Chairs' Statement on Frankfurt Face-to-Face Meeting. The Cross Community Working Group (CWG) on Naming Related Functions met for a face-to-face in Frankfurt, Germany on 19 – 20 November 2014. The highly diverse CWG is one of the three groups submitting a proposal to the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) as part of the overall IANA Stewardship Transition process.

IDN ccTLD Request from Armenia Successfully Passes String Evaluation

20 November 2014 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Armenia.

Results Available for 19 November 2014 Auction

19 November 2014 | On 19 November 2014, an Auction conducted by ICANN's authorized Auction service provider, Power Auctions LLC, was held to resolve a string contention set for one new generic Top-level Domain (gTLD) string, DOT.

Policy Implementation Update

17 November 2014 | ICANN announces the implementation of amended rules for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

Upcoming Events

8-12 February 2014: 52nd 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."