Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 14 December 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

RAA Negotiations Update - December 2012

14 December 2012 | Over many months of negotiations, ICANN and the Registrars have made significant progress in negotiating the 12 recommendations from law enforcement authorities on improvements to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.

Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services Launched

14 December 2012 | 13 December 2012... Fadi Chehadé, ICANN's President and CEO, is announcing the creation of an Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services.

Leader Named for Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services

14 December 2012 | 13 December 2012... ICANN's President and CEO, Fadi Chehadé, is launching a comprehensive effort to examine and redefine the purpose and provision of gTLD registration data (referred to as "WHOIS").

Consultation on IANA Secure Notification Process

12 December 2012 | A consultation on the IANA Secure Notification Process, as part of the 2012 IANA Functions Contract. The feedback received during this consultation will help ICANN implement a secure notification system that best meets the needs of the relevant stakeholders.

Upcoming Events

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

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 Operating Plan and Budget

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."