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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 26 December 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

WHOIS Accuracy Pilot Study Report

23 December 2014 | The WHOIS Pilot Accuracy Study Report highlights the design, methodology and findings of a pilot study commissioned by ICANN to inform the design of its WHOIS Accuracy Reporting System.

Request for Proposal for Web Accessibility Assessment for ICANN.org

23 December 2014 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") is seeking one or more providers to conduct an assessment of website accessibility including ICANN.org and possibly the related subsidiary websites.

A New L-Root Instance Established with ICANN and China's ZDNS Cooperation

22 December 2014 | Beijing, China … A new L-Root instance has been installed in China, increasing the Domain Name System's (DNS) overall fault tolerance and its resilience against certain types of cyber threats, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Joint Statement from ISOC / ICANN Meeting

20 December 2014 | On 17 December 2014 representatives from ISOC and ICANN, along with the chairs of the IETF and IAB, met to discuss two separate timely topics, the IANA Stewardship Transition and the NETMundial Initiative.

Upcoming Events

8-12 February 2015: 52nd International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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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."