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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 16 July 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Updated: EXTENSION OF DEADLINE - Call for Applicants for a Position of Volunteer Review Team Member

15 July 2010 | ICANN invites interested individuals to apply for a position of volunteer Review Team Member on the following teams: the Security, Stability and Resiliency of the DNS Review Team and the WHOIS Policy Review Team. The deadline to submit documents has been extended to 29 July 2010 – 23:59 UTC.

Your Input Requested on Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Initial Report

12 July 2010 | The GNSO Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery (PEDNR) Policy Development Process (PDP) Working Group published its Initial Report on 31 May. The PEDNR WG is now looking for your input on the Initial Report to help inform its deliberations going forward.

Brussels Fellowship Program Reached Successful Conclusion

12 July 2010 | This 38th ICANN International public meeting marked the 3rd year and 10th round of the ICANN Fellowship Program.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."