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Message from Lim Choon Sai to Louis Touton

Subject: Re: [Re: CORRECTION: SGNIC Application for Trademark Registration of ".sg"]
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 14:20:55 +0800
From: Lim Choon Sai
To: Louis Touton
CC: Sharil Tarmizi, Valerie d'Costa, Winnie Tham Wai Yee

Dear Mr Touton

Further to my email below, I am pleased to inform you that SGNIC has decided to withdraw the trademark applications for .sg in the three classes 38, 41 and 42. We have informed IPOS of SGNIC's decision on 14 March 2003.

We look forward to the discussion at the GAC on how countries and ccTLD managers should respond to a situation where their country code has been subject to trademark registration by any entity, such as a private company. We hope that ccTLD managers will receive guidance on the issue soon.

With best regards,

Lim Choon Sai
General Manager
SGNIC

[For related correspondence, see Letter from Louis Touton to Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi (10 February 2003).]

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."