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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 March 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

WHOIS Review Team – Call for Public Comment

4 March 2011 | The WHOIS Review Team's first tasks have been to define key terms from its 9.3.1 section of Affirmation of Commitments scope and they are welcoming public comment on the those issues.

ccNSO Review – Final WG Report

3 March 2011 | The ccNSO Review WG submitted its draft final report for public comment on 15 November 2010.

Hear Vint Cerf, One of the "Fathers of the Internet", at the At-Large NARALO Showcase on Monday, 14 March During ICANN's Silicon Valley Meeting in San Francisco

2 March 2011 | The North American Regional At-Large Organization (NARALO) is pleased to host Dr. Vinton ("Vint") Cerf's keynote speech, "Amplifying the Voices of Civil Society" at the NARALO Showcase during ICANN's 40th Meeting to be held in San Francisco.

IDN ccTLD Request From Ukraine Successfully Passes String Evaluation

1 March 2011 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Ukraine.

Updated: ICANN Meeting 41 Fellowship Application Round Extended One Week

28 February 2011 | ICANN is extending the deadline for accepting applications to the June ICANN 41 meeting until 6 March 00:00 UTC due to a venue location change.


Upcoming Events

13 - 18 March 2011: 40th International Public ICANN Meeting - San Francisco, CA, USA

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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."