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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 14 June 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Initial Report on Protection of IGO and INGO Identifiers in All gTLDs

14 June 2013 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization ("GNSO") Policy Development Process Working Group tasked with addressing the issue of protecting the identifiers of certain International Government Organizations ("IGOs") and International Non-Governmental Organizations ("INGOs") in all gTLDs has published its Initial Report for public comment.

NGPC Progress on Addressing GAC Beijing Advice on New gTLDs

14 June 2013 | The ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) met on 11 June 2013 to discuss the GAC Beijing advice regarding singular and plural versions of the same string as a New gTLD.

Webinar: Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant TLD Program Update

13 June 2013 | You are invited to join the IDN Variant TLD Program webinar indented to provide a status update of the Program and current IDN Variant TLD Projects, as well as to address questions around the prerequisites for implementation of IDN Variant TLDs and upcoming community involvement.

Upcoming Events

14 - 18 July 2013: 47th International Public ICANN Meeting - Durban

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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."