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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 24 June 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Historic Singapore Meeting Concludes After Significant Advances to Internet's Naming System

24 June 2011 | ICANN wrapped up one of its most historic meetings after approving a plan on 20 June to usher in a vast change in the Internet's Domain Name System.

Public Comment: How Do We Raise Global Awareness of New gTLDs?

24 June 2011 | ICANN is seeking public comment on a working draft of the plan that the ICANN Communications Department intends to follow in seeking to raise global awareness of new gTLDs during the rest of 2011.

ICANN Names Technology Public Policy Expert as its First Vice President of Europe

23 June 2011 | ICANN has named Thomas Spiller to the newly created position of Vice President, Europe.

Analysis of ICANN Turnover – FY10 and FY11 [PDF, 152 KB]

22 June 2011 | In a continuing effort to ensure that ICANN is a quality workplace and a "workplace of choice", ICANN has conducted an analysis of staff turnover from July 2009 through May 2011.

ICANN Approves Historic Change to Internet's Domain Name System

20 June 2011 | ICANN's Board of Directors has approved a plan to usher in one of the biggest changes ever to the Internet's Domain Name System. The Board vote was 13 approving, 1 opposed, and 2 abstaining.


Upcoming Events

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

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 FY11 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."