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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 20 January 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Public Comment: .CAT WHOIS Proposed Changes

20 January 2012 | ICANN opened the public comment period for the Fundacio puntCAT's, request to change its Whois according to EU data protection legislation.

CEO Search Committee Announces Deadline for Submitting Applications

19 January 2012 | To ensure full consideration, candidates for the CEO position should submit their application by February 17, 2012.

Application Window for New Top-Level Domain Names Successfully Passes One-Week Mark [PDF, 298 KB]

19 January 2012 | One week after ICANN began accepting applications for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), the application system is functioning without a hitch.

Public Comment: Framework for the FY 13 Budget

17 January 2012 | The release of the Framework for the FY 13 Budget kicks off the operational planning process for ICANN, providing the community with their first look at the current and planned work, along with estimated financial resources required for FY13.


Upcoming Events

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

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."