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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 October 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Paul Mockapetris to Serve as Senior Security Advisor to Generic Domains Division

4 October 2013 | ICANN today announced that Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), has agreed to serve as Senior Security Advisor to the Generic Domains Division and its President, Akram Atallah.

Removal of Eleven Test Internationalized Top-Level Domains from the Root Zone

2 October 2013 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of the testing period for internationalized top-level domains (IDNs) in the DNS root zone.

Revised Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Procedure (PICDRP)

2 October 2013 | The revised PICDRP incorporates community-proposed revisions, and is being posted for comment to give an opportunity for the community to review and provide feedback on this procedure.

NGPC Considers Remaining Beijing and Durban Advice on New gTLDs

1 October 2013 | The ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) met on 28 September 2013 and, among other things, adopted a scorecard of remaining advice from the Beijing and Durban GAC Communiqués.

ICANN Appoints Chair and Chair-Elect for the 2014 Nominating Committee (NomCom)

1 October 2013 | The ICANN Board is pleased to announce that it has appointed Cheryl Langdon-Orr as Chair and Stéphane Van Gelder as Chair-Elect for the 2014 Nominating Committee (NomCom).


Upcoming Events

17-21 November 2013: 48th International Public ICANN Meeting - Buenos Aires

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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."