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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 15 February 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Concludes Successful India Meeting

15 February 2008 | A total of 720 participants from 76 countries, including 290 participants from the host country India, took part in the meeting, and helped ICANN move forward on a number of discussions.

Asia-Pacific Internet Users Big Part of ICANN's New Delhi Meeting

14 February 2008 | Individual Internet users from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands have direct input into ICANN, a fact recognized today with the ceremonial signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between ICANN and the Internet user groups who participate in the Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO).

ICANN and Iron Mountain Complete Registrar Data Escrow QA Testing and Begin Accepting Escrow Deposits

13 February 2008 | The Registrar Data Escrow program is an ICANN initiative designed to enhance protection of registrants by requiring ICANN-accredited registrars to escrow critical registration data so that it can be released to ICANN upon termination of the registrar's accreditation agreement.

Background Information Regarding Previous New GTLD Application Rounds

13 February 2008 | In planning for implementation of the new gTLD policy recommendations, and in response to inquiries form the ICANN community, ICANN is conducting a review of the status of applications from the New gTLD round in 2000 that were not selected for negotiations.

Translation Programme Put Out for Community Review

13 February 2008 | The draft translation programme that will be used by ICANN to communicate and interact with non-English speakers has been put out for community comment.

Senior Leaders of India's IT Sector to Address ICANN Meeting

12 February 2008 | Some of the most prestigious names in the Indian IT industry shared their insights and experiences with the global audience at a session at the ICANN's 31st International Public Meeting in New Delhi.

ICANN Explores India's Pioneering Work on IDNs

12 February 2008 | The Indian experience with Internationalized Domain Names and possible lessons for global implementation of IDNs was front and center at a workshop at ICANN's 31st International Public Meeting.

ICANN Meeting Opened by Shri Jainder Singh, Secretary, India's Department of Information Technology

12 February 2008 | ICANN opened its 31st International Public Meeting in New Delhi yesterday with an address from Shri Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, the Government of India.

ICANN Opens 31st International Public Meeting in New Delhi

11 February 2008 | "This year is an important one for the future of ICANN. The U.S. government is in the middle of its Midterm Review of its Joint Project Agreement with ICANN, and we're arguing it's time to take the final step to originally envisioned private sector model for ICANN," said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN's Board Chairman.

Update on the 2008 ICANN Nominating Committee

10 February 2008 | The 2008 Nominating Committee began its work in November 2007 following the ICANN Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, California, and is actively seeking qualified candidates for key positions within ICANN.

ICANN Recovers Large Block of Internet Address Space

10 February 2008 | ICANN has found a little breathing room in the IPv4 address space with its recovery of a block of 16 million IPv4 addresses.

Independent Evaluator Seeks Public Input to At-Large Advisory Committee ('ALAC') Review

10 February 2008 | Westlake Consulting Limited (WCL) was selected by ICANN's Board of Directors to conduct an independent review of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC).

ICANN in the News

These links lead to external news stories. ICANN is not responsible for the content of these pages.

ICANN: TLDs could end with EXE. Confused? Users may be too (Ars Technica)

14 February 2008 | ICANN is in the process of hammering out its new generic top-level domain (gTLD) policy, and has begun to address technical issues that could pop up once the new round of applications is open later this year. As part of a discussion on how to manage DNS stability during this potentially huge expansion of the TLD system, an organization within ICANN has proposed a few basic rules for what can and can't be used as a domain extension.

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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."