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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 March 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Accredited Registrar, Lead Networks, Placed Under the Responsibility of a Court Appointed Receiver

17 March 2010 | Bret Fausett, Of Counsel at Adorno Yoss Alvarado & Smith, was appointed receiver of ICANN-accredited registrar, Lead Networks, Pvt. Ltd., by the United States District Court for the Central District of California in the action entitled VERIZON CALIFORNIA INC., et al. v. LEAD NETWORKS DOMAINS PRIVATE LIMITED et al, Case No. CV-09-00613 ABC (CWx).

Affirmation of Commitments: Candidates for the Accountability and Transparency Review Team

16 March 2010 | ICANN received 25 candidatures following the Call for Applicants for volunteer Review Team Members on the Accountability and Transparency review. SO/ACs will inform ICANN of the candidatures they wish to endorse by March 17th.

ICANN Board Stays on Course for Launch of New gTLD Program

15 March 2010 | In closing ICANN's 37th international meeting in Nairobi, ICANN's Board chose to continue with the current implementation plans leading to launch of the New gTLD Program, rather than pursuing a proposal to institute a system of Expressions of Interest, a pre-registration process for those wishing to apply for a new generic top-level domain.

Call for Participation on the Vertical Integration Policy Development Process (PDP) Working Group

12 March 2010 | The GNSO Council has initiated a policy development process on the topic of Vertical Integration between Registrars and Registries. At its 10 March 2010 meeting, the GNSO Council formed a working group to perform the activities of this PDP, and is now seeking volunteers to serve on the working group. If you would like to participate in this working group as a volunteer, kindly respond by email to gnso.secretariat@gnso.icann.org by Monday, 22 March.

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20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

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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."