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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 April 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Statement on TLD Application System

12 April 2012 | Out of an abundance of caution, ICANN took the TAS system offline to protect applicant data. We are examining how this issue occurred and considering appropriate steps forward.

Period of 12-22, April 2012: Public Comment Periods Approaching Closing Date

12 April 2012 | For your convenience, we have included direct links below to comments that will soon close.

TAS Temporarily Offline

12 April 2012 | TAS will be shut down until Tuesday at 23:59 UTC – unless otherwise notified before that time.

.post Agreement Amendment

9 April 2012 | ICANN is posting for public comment the Universal Postal Union (UPU) request to amend its Sponsorship TLD agreement to remove the requirement to reserve the "previously-reserved IANA domain strings" at the second level.

Public Comment: Second Annual IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process Review

9 April 2012 | ICANN is now opening a public comment forum for the second annual review of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process.


Upcoming Events

24 - 29 June 2012: 44th International Public ICANN Meeting - Prague

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, 2011 - 2014

Adopted FY12 Operating Plan and Budget

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."