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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 23 January 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Join the ICANN Quarterly Stakeholder Report on 29 January 2015

23 January 2015 | Los Angeles, California…How has ICANN progressed against its strategic and operating plans for the second quarter of FY2015?

Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) | Chairs' Statement: Thomas Rickert - León Sanchez - Mathieu Weill

23 January 2015 | The Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) held its first face-to-face meeting in Frankfurt, Germany on 19-20 January 2015.

What to Expect at ICANN 52: A Guide for Business Stakeholders

21 January 2015 | A webinar on the following topics:

  • The upcoming ICANN 52 public meeting in Singapore and sessions of interest,
  • Opportunities to follow, participate and join work of business stakeholders in their various constituency groups and,
  • The latest topics in the Internet domain name and addressing systems.

Webinar Invitation – IANA Stewardship Transition: ICANN Workshop and Webinar for Civil Society and the Noncommercial Sector

21 January 2015 | ICANN is hosting an information session to brief and discuss the ongoing evolution of Internet governance. This session will be tailored to provide an update on the U.S. Government’s announcement to transition its oversight of the IANA functions contract to the global multistakeholder community, and the parallel process of Enhancing ICANN’s Accountability in light of this changing historical relationship.

GNSO Policy & Implementation Working Group Publishes Initial Recommendations Report for Public Comment

19 January 2015 | Mainly as a result of discussions stemming from implementation related issues of the new generic Top-Level Doman (gTLD) program, there has been an increased focus on which topics call for policy and which call for implementation work, including which processes should be used, at what time and how issues which are the subject of diverging opinions during the implementation process should be acted upon. Following several discussions, including the publication of a staff discussion paper and a community session during the ICANN meeting in Beijing in April 2013, the GNSO Council decided in July 2013 to form a Working Group (WG) which was tasked to provide the GNSO Council with a set of recommendations on a number of questions that specifically relate to policy and implementation in a GNSO context. The WG has now published its Initial Recommendations Report for community input which can be provided either through input received via this public comment forum or via the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PI-InitialReport


Upcoming Events

8-12 February 2015: 52nd International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY15 Operating Plan and Budget

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."