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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 3 April 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN FY14 Form 990 Announcement

3 April 2015 | ICANN's FY14 Form 990 is now posted and is available to the community.

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN 54

3 April 2015 | Today, launches our latest application round where participants will join us at ICANN 54 in Dublin, Ireland this coming October.

ICANN Successfully Completes Two Independently Conducted Service Organization Control Audits

2 April 2015 | 2 April 2015 – ICANN today announced that it has achieved the Service Organization Control (SOC) 3 certification, formerly known as Systrust, of its Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) Root Key Signing Key systems for the fifth consecutive year.

Release of Country and Territory Names within the .HONDA, .AXA, .EPSON, .HSBC, .XYZ and .COLLEGE TLDs

31 March 2015 | Five (5) Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) requests were submitted by the registry operators listed below to allow the release of country and territory names for the below TLDs. In total, the requests concern 6 New gTLDs.

Proposed Implementation of GNSO PDP Recommendations on Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part C

30 March 2015 | The public comment proceeding seeks to obtain community input on the proposed implementation of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Development Process (PDP) recommendations on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part C.

CWG-Stewardship Chairs' Statement | Summary of Istanbul Face-to-Face Meeting

30 March 2015 | The Cross Community Working Group on Naming Related Functions (CWG or CWG-Stewardship) held a face-to-face meeting in Istanbul on 26-27 March 2015.

Upcoming Events

21-25 June 2015: 53rd International Public ICANN Meeting – Buenos Aires

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Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY15 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."