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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 April 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN | Fellows Announced for Prague, Czech Republic Meeting

6 April 2012 | Global input and ideas will be on the rise at the 44th Public Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers thanks to ICANN's on-going Fellowship program.

RU-CENTER Provides Facilities for L-Root Site in Russia

4 April 2012 | Russian domain name services provider RU-CENTER and ICANN have collaborated on a common project for L-Root site installation in Russia.

Hotel Booking Links Now Open for ICANN's 2012 Meetings in Prague and Toronto

3 April 2012 | ICANN recently opened the hotel booking link and conference registration link for its upcoming 44th public meeting to be held 24-29 June 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic at the Hilton Prague Hotel.

Location Recommendations Now Being Accepted for ICANN's 2014 Meetings in Europe, North America, and Asia/Australia/Pacific

3 April 2012 | ICANN is actively seeking locations for its three public meetings to be held 23-28 March 2014 in Europe, 22-27 June 2014 in North America, and 12-17 October 2014 in Asia Pacific.

ICANN to Reveal Who Applied for Which New Generic Top-Level Domain

2 April 2012 | ICANN has set April 30th as its target date to release the list of applications for new generic top-level domains, specifying who has applied for which domain names.

Upcoming Events

24 - 29 June 2012: 44th International Public ICANN Meeting - Prague

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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."