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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 April 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Webinar Surveys Whois Requirements, Past and Future

9 April 2010 | In May last year, the GNSO Council tasked Policy Staff (with the assistance of technical staff and Council members as required) to collect and organize a comprehensive set of requirements for the Whois service.

Bulk Transfer of DotSpeedy Domains to Secura GmbH

9 April 2010 | ICANN has authorized a bulk transfer of DotSpeedy LLC's gTLD domain names to Secura GmbH, due to a compliance action taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of registrar DotSpeedy LLC (dba dotspeedy.com).

Webinars: Synchronized IDN ccTLDs

8 April 2010 | ICANN has published a set of Questions & Answers (Q&A) for the Proposed Implementation Plan for Synchronized IDN ccTLDs and is conducting two webinars.

Public Comment: Draft FY11 Community Travel Support Guidelines

8 April 2010 | A public comment period has opened today for 30 days on the topic of community travel support to ICANN meetings.

ICANN Consultation on New gTLD Agreement Amendment Process and Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Process

7 April 2010 | ICANN invites community participation in an open consultation on the Process for New gTLD Registry Agreement Amendments and the Trademark Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Process.

Upcoming Events

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

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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."