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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 2 April 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

The Accountability and Transparency Affirmation Review Team

2 April 2010 | ICANN publishes today the names of the Accountability and Transparency Review Team members.

Public Comment: GNSO Policy Development Process on Vertical Integration Between Registries and Registrars

29 March 2010 | The GNSO Council is seeking comments regarding the commencement of a policy development process on the topic of vertical integration between registries and registrars. The public comment period ends on 18 April 2010.

ICANN Nominating Committee Extends Deadline for Statements of Interest to 15 April 2010

29 March 2010 | In order to provide additional time for candidates to apply, ICANN's 2010 Nominating Committee (NomCom) has extended the deadline for Statements of Interest until 15 April 2010 23:59 UTC.

Bulk Transfer of SBNames' and ISPREG's Domains to PakNIC Ltd.

29 March 2010 | ICANN has authorized a bulk transfer of gTLD domain names from registrars SBNames Ltd. and ISPREG Ltd. to registrar PakNIC (Private) Limited, due to compliance actions taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of SBNames and ISPREG.

Upcoming Events

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

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ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY10 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."