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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 3 October 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

European Hosts Sought for October 2009 Meeting

3 October 2008 | Are you interested in hosting an ICANN meeting in 12 months' time? Are you based in Europe? If so, ICANN's meetings team would like to hear from you.

ICANN Seeks Interest in IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Process

2 October 2008 | In recent weeks the CEO & President of ICANN has written to national governments about the introduction of IDNs at the lop level of the domain name system, and to seek their assistance in forecasting the number of countries and territories interesting in seeking an IDN ccTLD/s through the fast track: process.

Breach Notices Sent to Joker.com and DNS.com.cn

1 October 2008 | ICANN has sent breach notices to two ICANN-accredited registrars, Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology Ltd., doing business as DNS.com.cn and Joker.com, on 30 September 2008.

ICANN: 10 Years Old Today

30 September 2008 | On 30 September 1998, ICANN's articles of incorporation were officially filed, recognizing "a nonprofit public benefit corporation...not organized for the private gain of any person."


Upcoming Events

2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt


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, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 KB]


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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."