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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 5 March 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Draft Delegation Rate Scenarios for New gTLDs

3 March 2010 | In February 2009, with Resolution 2009-02-03-04, the ICANN Board requested the Root Server System Advisory Committee, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, and ICANN staff, including the IANA team, to study potential issues regarding the addition of substantial numbers of new TLDs to the root zone.

Public Comments Requested on Chairs Draft Interim Paper for Policy on Introduction of IDN ccTLDs

2 March 2010 | The Chair of the ccNSO's Internationalised Domain Name Country Code Policy Development Process Working Group for the selection and delegation of IDN ccTLDs is pleased to announce the publication of the Chairs draft Interim Paper. The purpose of this paper is to report to the community on structure and potential directions of the recommendations for the overall policy.

Survey of IPv6 Availability on Commercial Firewalls

1 March 2010 | ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee is conducting a survey of the commercial firewall market to obtain information relating to IPv6 security service availability.

Reminder: Apply Now to Join the ICANN Board, the Councils of GNSO and ccNSO, and the ALAC

1 March 2010 | Applications will be considered in confidence and should be received by 2 April 2010 for full consideration. Selections will be announced in early September 2010.

Bulk Transfer of DNGLOBE Domains to Paknic

1 March 2010 | ICANN has authorized a bulk transfer of DNGLOBE LLC's gTLD domain names to Paknic (Private) Limited, due to a compliance action taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of registrar DNGLOBE.

Upcoming Events

7 - 12 March 2010: 37th International Public ICANN Meeting - Nairobi, Kenya

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

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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."