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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 3 December 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

New gTLD Economic Study Phase II Report is Released

3 December 2010 | Phase II of this independent economic analysis has now been completed.

Public Comment: Community Comment Invited on New Permanent Charter of GNSO's Commercial Stakeholder Group

2 December 2010 | The Constituencies of the GNSO's Commercial Stakeholder Group (CSG) have informed ICANN Staff that they have ratified a permanent CSG charter document.

Public Comment: Community Comment Invited on Petition To Form A New GNSO Not-for-Profit Organizations Constituency

1 December 2010 | The ICANN Board has now received its fifth formal petition - from the prospective Not-for-Profit Organizations Constituency (NPOC). The NPOC proponents propose to join the Non Commercial Stakeholders Group of the GNSO.

Sébastien Bachollet Selected Board Director by the ALAC/At-Large Community

30 November 2010 | On 28 November 2010, Cheryl Langdon-Orr, Chair of ALAC, announced that Mr. Sébastien Bachollet had secured the required support from the ALAC/At-Large community electorate to be declared the new Board Director selected by the At-Large community.

Public Comment Requested on Draft 2011-2014 Strategic Plan

27 November 2010 | As the next element of consultation on the 2011-2014 Strategic Plan, ICANN invites comments from the community on this amendment to last year's plan.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

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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."