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Public Comment - April 2011 Archive

Proposed New GNSO Policy Development Process

(ended 1 April 2011)
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Proposed Framework for the Fiscal Year 2012 (FY12) Operating Plan and Budget

(ended 4 April 11)
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Draft Proposal for the Study of Issues Related to the Delegation of IDN Variant TLDs

(ended 6 April 11)
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The Security, Stability and Resiliency of the DNS Review Team Set of Issues

(ended 6 April 2011)
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High Security Zone TLD Final Report

(ended 7 April 11)
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Proposed Recommendations for a Global Outreach Program

(ended 10 April 11)
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WHOIS Review Team

(ended 17 April 11)
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Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Working Group Proposed Final Report

(ended 7 April 11 Extended to 22 April 11)
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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."