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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 23 April 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Community Comment Invited on Recommended New GNSO Work Prioritization Process

23 April 2010 | At its 21 April 2010 meeting, the GNSO Council approved the use of a set of recommended new operating procedures designed to enable GNSO Councilors to begin categorizing and prioritizing their major work projects so that the Council can fulfill its new role as a strategic manager and coordinator of policy development activities within the GNSO.

Public Comment: Community Comment Invited on the Communications and Coordination Work Team (CCT) Final Consolidated Recommendations

23 April 2010 | Pursuant to a Resolution passed by the GNSO Council at its meeting on 21 April 2010, the community is invited to provide comments on a set of GNSO Improvements recommendations submitted by the Communications and Coordination Work Team (CCT) on 9 April 2010.

IDN ccTLD Request from Jordan Successfully Passes String Evaluation

21 April 2010 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed a IDN ccTLD string for Jordan.

Public Comment: Proposed Bylaws Amendment to Article III, Section 5, in Furtherance of the BGC Recommendation, Adopted by the Board on 12 March 2010, in Response to Reconsideration Request 10-1

19 April 2010 | During the 12 March 2010 Board meeting in Nairobi, the Board adopted the Board Governance Committee's recommendation calling for an amendment of Article III, section 5 of the ICANN Bylaws to require the posting of Board approved resolutions within two (2) business days after the conclusion of each Board meeting and the posting of the preliminary report within seven (7) business days after the conclusion of each Board meeting.

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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."