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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 November 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN CEO Announces Expanded Partnership Initiatives at Close of Internet Governance Forum [PDF, 207 KB]

9 November 2012 | Baku, Azerbaijan… ICANN Chief Executive Officer Fadi Chehadé has announced a series of working partnerships that have sprung out of this week's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Azerbaijan.

Apply Now for ICANN's Leadership Positions

7 November 2012 | ICANN's Nominating Committee (NomCom) invites Statements of Interest and candidate recommendations from the Internet community for key leadership positions to fulfill ICANN's technical and policy coordination role.

At-Large In Full Force at Internet Governance Forum

6 November 2012 | Demonstrating the power of the multistakeholder model to rally individual Internet users, nearly 30 members of ICANN's At-Large Community are participating in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Baku, Azerbaijan from 6-9 November 2012.

Upcoming Events

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

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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."