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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 17 April 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Update to BCG Study - Country Clusters Analysis Now Available

16 April 2015 | Which Wheels to Grease? Reducing Friction in the Internet Economy is an update to the 2014 report Greasing the Wheels of the Internet Economy by the Boston Consulting Group commissioned by ICANN.

WEBINAR: Cross Community Working Group (CWG) On IANA Naming Related Functions: Briefing on 2nd Draft Proposal for Public Comment

16 April 2015 | Following the request of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S Department of Commerce, for ICANN to "convene a multistakeholder process to develop a plan to transition the U.S. government stewardship role" with regard to the IANA Functions and related root zone management, a Cross Community Working Group (CWG-Stewardship) was formed with the purpose of developing a consolidated transition proposal for the elements of the IANA Functions relating to domain names.

ICG Publishes Update to Process Timeline

13 April 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) today announced that it has published an update to the group's Process Timeline.

Upcoming Events

21-25 June 2015: 53rd International Public ICANN Meeting – Buenos Aires

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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."