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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 August 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Calls for Expressions of Interest to Host 2009 Meeting in Europe and 2010 Meeting in Africa

22 August 2008 | In accordance with ICANN's commitment to continuous improvement in the management of meetings, and in response to requests for advanced planning, ICANN today posts a call for Expressions of Interest to host meetings to be held in Europe on 25-30 October 2009, and in Africa on 7-12 February 2010.

IDN TLD Allocation Implementation Processes

20 August 2008 | Following the progress on the IDN TLD allocation processes during the ICANN meeting in Paris, a new area has been made available to describe IDN policy development and IDN ccTLD allocation developments.

Fellows Announced for ICANN's Cairo Meeting

18 August 2008 | ICANN announced the 28 successful fellowship applicants who will be attending ICANN's 33rd International Public Meeting in Cairo this November.

Upcoming Events

2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 KB]

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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."