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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 5 February 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

DNGLOBE LLC Loses ICANN Accreditation

5 February 2010 | ICANN terminated its accreditation agreement with registrar DNGLOBE LLC for failure to comply with the requirements of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA).

Public Comment: Call for Community Comment on the Proposed Process for the 2010 Selection of an ICANN At-Large Board Member

5 February 2010 | All members of the ICANN community and the public are invited to review the ALAC and At-Large Community White Paper on the Proposed Process for the 2010 Selection of an ICANN Board Member and share comments through 6 March 2010.

Public Comment: Your Input Requested on Proposed GNSO Working Group Guidelines

5 February 2010 | As part of the GNSO Improvements Process, a Working Group (WG) Work Team was tasked with developing a Working Group Model. To this end, the WG WT has developed a document entitled 'Working Group Guidelines.' The WG WT is seeking your input on this document.

Publication of Three Review Working Group Final Reports

3 February 2010 | ICANN is pleased to announce that the following review working group final reports have been published: The Board review WG Final Report; The SSAC review WG Final Report; and The Nominating Committee review WG Final Report.

Call for Applicants for the Position of Volunteer Review Team Member

3 February 2010 | ICANN reminds interested individuals that February 17th 2010, midnight UTC is the application deadline for the position of volunteers Review Team Members representing a Supporting Organization or Advisory Committee for the 'Accountability and Transparency' review which is called on by the Affirmation of Commitments.


Upcoming Events

7 - 12 March 2010: 37th International Public ICANN Meeting - Nairobi, Kenya

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

About ICANN

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Draft Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

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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."