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Public Comment - January 2011 archive

ccNSO Review – Draft Working Group Report

(ended 15 January 11)
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Interim Paper Inclusion of IDN ccTLDs in the ccNSO

(ended 21 January 11)
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Proposed Changes to Enhance ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Evaluation Process

(ended 21 January 11)
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Permanent Charter of GNSO's Commercial Stakeholder Group Completed – Public Comment Invited

(ended 23 January 11)
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TLG Review – Final Report

(ended 24 January 11)
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Draft 2011-2014 Strategic Plan

(ended 10 January 11 Extended to 25 January 11)
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Interim Report of Geographic Regions Review Working Group

(ended 30 January 11)
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New Not-for-Profit Operational Concerns Constituency Petition and Charter

(ended 23 January 11 Extended to 30 January 11)
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Interim Report of the Internationalized Registration Data Working Group

(ended 13 January 11 Extended to 14 March 11)
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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."