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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 7 May 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

WEBINAR: Policy Development at ICANN

6 May 2010 | On Thursday 20 May, ICANN Policy Staff will host a webinar that introduces newcomers to the world of ICANN and policy development. The webinar will provide an overview of ICANN as an organization, what issues ICANN policy addresses, who develops policy at ICANN (and how), and most importantly, how you can become involved and help ICANN to shape the future of the Internet.

First IDN ccTLDs Available

5 May 2010 | For the first time in the history of the Internet, non-Latin characters are being used for top-level domains. The first IDN country-code top-level domains were inserted in the DNS root zone earlier today.

Accountability and Transparency Review Team – Audio Streaming of F2F Meeting (5-6 May 2010)

1 May 2010 | The first F2F meeting of the Affirmation mandated Accountability and Transparency Review Team was held in Marina Del Rey on Wednesday, 5 May 2010 and Thursday, 6 May 2010.

Upcoming Events

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

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, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY10 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."