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Workshop on Emerging Issues in the DNS Industry | 9–10 May 2016

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ICANN is hosting this workshop in collaboration with the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe.

Event Location

Meikles Hotel, Harare, Zimbabwe
Website: http://www.meikles.com
Email: res@meikles.com
Telephone: +263 4 707721

Agenda

Topics of interest to the Domain Name System (DNS) industry in Africa, including:

  • Trademarks and intellectual property rights (IPR)
  • Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) adoption in Africa – the case for DNSSEC
  • ICANN accreditation – why and how
  • Draft version of Africa DNS Market Study
  • International Domain Names

Registration information can be found here.

Background

In 2014, ICANN hosted a workshop in Cotonou, Benin. This first workshop aimed at increasing the understanding of how trademarks and IPR affect the DNS industry. Participants learned about how the DNS works, and DNS industry representatives learned how to better manage IPR issues collaboratively as multistakeholders.

The outcome was encouraging – participants called for ICANN to host future workshops. This follow-on workshop will cover emerging topics of interest related to the DNS business in Africa.

For any queries please contact us on: aftop2016@icann.org

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."