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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 2 December 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

RAA Negotiations Community WIKI

2 December 2011 | In Dakar, ICANN announced the commencement of negotiations with representatives of the Registrar Stakeholder Group to amend the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA). To promote transparency and timely communications, ICANN has created a dedicated Wiki to describe the communications plan, publish regular status updates on the amendment topics under consideration, and provide comment opportunities to the broader ICANN community.

EBERO RFI Q&A Published

29 November 2011 | On 16 November 2011, ICANN held a teleconference with potential respondents to the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator Request for Information (EBERO RFI). Potential respondents submitted questions to ICANN. Here are the questions and answers that may help all the respondents to better prepare the RFIs.

Global Policy Proposal for Post Exhaustion IPv4 Allocation Mechanisms by IANA - Updated Background Report

28 November 2011 | Following list discussions over slightly different drafts early in 2011, the current version of this global policy proposal was first formally introduced in the APNIC region on 20 February 2011 and has since been introduced and advanced in all the other RIRs. The proposal has been adopted in APNIC, LACNIC and RIPE and has passed final call in AfriNIC and ARIN.

Upcoming Events

11 - 16 March 2012: 43rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Costa Rica

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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."