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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 21 October 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Phase II of Public Comments Process Enhancements

20 October 2011 | The Public Comment topic "Phase II of Public Comments Process Enhancements" is recently closed, following the end of its Reply Cycle on 15 October 2011.

IDN ccTLD Request From Malaysia Successfully Passes String Evaluation

20 October 2011 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Malaysia.

Cyber Security Experts Meet to Discuss Protections for the Domain Name System [PDF, 284 KB]

18 October 2011 | Some of the world's leading Internet's security experts met today in Rome to discuss how to best protect the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) from cyber threats.

Public Comment: RySG Alternative Proposal for Continuity Operations Instrument

17 October 2011 | Public comment is requested concerning the recently received from the proposal for Establishment of a Continued Operations Fund. This proposal comes from the Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) and is accompanied by an addendum (Proposed Continuity Operations Instrument) produced by the Afilias and PIR, supported by some other registries, registry applicants and other interested parties.


Upcoming Events

23 - 28 October 2011: 42nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Dakar

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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."