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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 8 July 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part B Policy Development Process (PDP) Recommendations for Board Consideration

8 July 2011 | The GNSO approved at its meeting on 22 June 2011 a number of recommendations on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part B Policy Development Process (PDP). You are invited to submit comments until 8 August (11.00 UTC) before final consideration by the ICANN Board.

Apply Now for the At-Large Advisory Committee, ALAC

8 July 2011 | Following the resignation of the ALAC representative from the North American region, appointed by ICANN's 2010 Nominating Committee (NomCom), the 2011 NomCom invites Statements of Interest for this important ICANN leadership position.

Public Comment: Report from Board-GAC Joint Working Group

7 July 2011 | The Board-GAC Joint Working Group was established 26 June 2009 to conduct a review of the role of the GAC within ICANN. The final report from the Working Group was submitted to the Board in Singapore and the Board resolved on 24 June 2011 to have the report posted for public comment.

2011 Workshop on DNS Health & Security to be held in Rome, Italy

6 July 2011 | GCSEC, in cooperation with ICANN and DNS-OARC, announces the 2011 Workshop on DNS Health and Security (DNS-EASY 2011) will be held in Rome, Italy, 18-19 October 2011.

New gTLD Global Awareness Campaign – Request for Proposals

5 July 2011 | To help us achieve our goal of educating the world about the New gTLD Awareness program we have issued a request for proposals (RFP).

Upcoming Events

23 - 28 October 2011: 42nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Dakar

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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."