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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 March 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Initial Evaluation Results Released for First Set of Applications

22 March 2013 | Today marks a major milestone in the New gTLD Program: Initial Evaluation (IE) results for the first set of new gTLD applications have been released to applicants and the general public.

IDN Variant TLD Program -- Conclusion of Third Phase

21 March 2013 | The IDN Variant TLD Program continues to progress towards a future secure and stable delegation of IDN variant TLDs. We are announcing today the conclusion of the third (out of four) phase of the Program with the publication of two reports: the IDN Root Label Generation Rules (LGR) Procedure, and the User Experience Study for Active Variant TLDs.

New gTLD Sessions Planned for Beijing

21 March 2013 | Updated 22 March 2013 -- The New gTLD Program continues to move forward. Release of Initial Evaluation results will begin this week and the Trademark Clearinghouse will launch on 26 March.

Composition of the Meeting Strategy Working Group (MSWG)

21 March 2013 | 20 March 2013 -- The Selectors of the Meeting Strategy Working Group (MSWG) announce the composition of the Working Group.

2013 Nominating Committee is Actively Seeking Candidates

19 March 2013 | ICANN's 2013 Nominating Committee (NomCom) will be attending the 46th ICANN Meeting in Beijing, China, (http://beijing46.icann.org/) and conduct a number of open meetings to provide detailed information to the community about the NomCom's work and obtain input from the ICANN entities regarding desirable applicant qualities.

Upcoming Events

7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

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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."