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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 October 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Bulk Transfer of Red Register Domains to DirectNIC

8 October 2009 | ICANN has authorized a bulk transfer of registrar Red Register Inc.'s domain names to DirectNIC Ltd., due to the de-accreditation of Red Register Inc.

Organizational Review: Extension of Three Public Comment Periods

7 October 2009 | As requested by Community Members, the deadlines of the three following public comment periods have been moved to the 22nd of November: SSAC review WG draft report; NomCom review WG draft report; and Board review draft final report.

Advisory: Availability of Bulk Transfers in Individual gTLDs

5 October 2009 | This advisory is intended to clarify that Part B of the Transfer Policy does permit ICANN to approve a bulk transfer of all of a registrar's names in a particular gTLD without requiring simultaneous transfer of its names in other gTLDs.

ICANN Announces Important Milestones in Making the Internet More Accessible to All

4 October 2009 | In the past several days, ICANN has announced recent milestones regarding changes in how the Internet community will use the Internet in the near future. These important developments include the plan for deployment of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in the next few months and significant progress in developing the model for delegating new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).

Public Comments: Draft Report of the NomCom Review Finalization Working Group

3 October 2009 | In June 2007 Interisle Consulting Group was contracted to undertake the external review of the Nominating Committee. The NomCom Review Finalization Working Group issues now for presentation at the Seoul meeting and for public comment its draft report.

Public Comments: Draft Report of the SSAC Review Working Group

3 October 2009 | The Board appointed JAS Communications as the consultants for the independent review of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee—SSAC. Based on its analysis of the available evidence and on the numerous comments received, the SSAC review WG releases now its draft report for presentation in Seoul and public comments.

Public Comments: Draft Final Report of the Board Review Working Group

3 October 2009 | ICANN appointed the Boston Consulting Group/Colin Carter & Associates to perform the external review of its Board of Directors; The WG releases now its draft final report, which will be presented at the Seoul meeting.

Upcoming Events

25 - 30 October 2009: 36th International Public ICANN Meeting - Seoul, South Korea

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

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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."