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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 8 February 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Upcoming Multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Events in the Middle East and Africa

7 February 2013 | ICANN will participate with the regional IG community in two important events in March 2013. These events will be attended by regional leaders from government, the private sector and civil society.

Internet Groups Discuss New Priorities In Latin America and Caribbean [PDF, 164 KB]

7 February 2013 | Montevideo, Uruguay… The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean (Lacnic) are discussing how to expand the availability and quality of Internet services in the area.

Revised New gTLD Registry Agreement Including Additional Public Interest Commitments Specification

5 February 2013 | ICANN is seeking public comment on a revised draft of the New gTLD Registry Agreement that will serve as the contractual document between successful New gTLD Applicants and ICANN, and will govern the rights and obligations of new gTLD registry operators.

"Closed Generic" gTLD Applications

5 February 2013 | ICANN is seeking public comment on the subject of "closed generic" gTLD applications and whether specific requirements should be adopted corresponding to this type of application.

Interim Report IDN ccNSO Policy Development Process

5 February 2013 | In the framework of the ccNSO Policy Development Process on IDN ccTLD's the purpose of the Interim Report is to report on and seek feed-back on feasible recommendations for overall policy for the selection of IDN country code Top Level Domains strings (IDN ccTLD's) and the inclusion of IDN ccTLD managers in the ccNSO.

Upcoming Events

7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

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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."