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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 31 October 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Formalizes Relationship with ccTLD Manager for Cocos (Keeling) Islands (.cc)

31 October 2008 | ICANN has announced that it has signed an exchange of letters with the country code top level domain manager for .cc-Cocos (Keeling) Islands, eNIC Cocos (Keeling) Islands Pty Ltd.

EstDomains Update: Notice of Termination Stayed

29 October 2008 | ICANN received a response from EstDomains regarding the notice of termination. To assess the merits of the claims made in EstDomains' response, ICANN has stayed the termination process as ICANN analyzes these claims.

Public Comment: Morality and Public Order Memorandum

29 October 2008 | An additional explanatory memorandum was posted for public comments to assist with the understanding of the implementation work related to morality and public order objections in New gTLDs.

Expressions of Interest Sought for Bulk Transfer of Registrations

28 October 2008 | ICANN seeks expressions of interest from registrars to receive bulk transfer of names from de-accredited registrar EstDomains.

Public Comment: The Role Of Individual Internet Users in the GNSO

28 October 2008 | The ICANN Board has asked for additional community input on the appropriate role and representation of individual commercial and non-commercial Internet users in the Generic Names Supporting Organization.

Upcoming Events

2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt

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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."