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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 29 July 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Request for Community Input on Formulation of 2012-2015 Strategic Plan

29 July 2011 | As part of the strategic planning process each year, ICANN seeks public comment to inform the development of the next version of its Strategic Plan.

ICANN Nominating Committee Recruitment Period Ends for the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)

29 July 2011 | On 25 July 2011, the nomination period closed for the ALAC Representative from the North American region, an interim vacancy to be filled this year by the 2011 Nominating Committee (NomCom).

Public Comment: Proposed IDN Guidelines Revision

27 July 2011 | ICANN is today publishing a proposed version 3.0 of the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Implementation Guidelines for public comment.

Public Comment: Preliminary Issue Report on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part C

25 July 2011 | ICANN Staff is seeking comments on the Preliminary Issue Report on the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy Part C.


Upcoming Events

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

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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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."