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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 5 April 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Commends .JOBS Use of Trademark Clearinghouse

5 April 2013 | Beijing, China... The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) welcomes the decision by. JOBS to use the Trademark Clearinghouse database to support a sunrise registration period ahead of its planned open registration period to begin later this year.

Root Zone Scaling Measurements at L-Root

3 April 2013 | To better be able to identify any performance impact on L-Root caused by a larger root zone, work has been done to implement additional instrumentation of L-Root's infrastructure.

Questions to the Community on Accountability and Transparency within ICANN

2 April 2013 | With the goal of producing final recommendations by 31 December 2013, the second Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT 2), mandated by paragraph 9.1 of the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC), is currently in the process of defining its scope, roadmap and work program.

ICANN Names Back-up Registry Operators for New gTLDs

2 April 2013 | Marking another milestone in the implementation of the community-developed New gTLD Program, ICANN today announced the selection of three geographically diverse emergency back-end registry operators, or EBEROs.


Upcoming Events

7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 Operating Plan and Budget

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."