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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 February 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Global Policy Proposal for the Allocation of IPv4 by IANA Post Exhaustion – Background Report, 10 February 2011

11 February 2011 | At its meeting on 25 January 2011, the Board resolved to request tracking of the development of a Global Policy Proposal for the Allocation of IPv4 by the IANA Post Exhaustion, under discussion in the addressing community. The status overview presented below is compiled in response to this request and will be further updated as developments proceed, for information to ICANN entities and the wider community.

Updated: ICANN's Board and GAC to Meet on New gTLDs

9 February 2011 | The RSVP list is now closed.

IDN ccTLD Request From Georgia Successfully Passes String Evaluation

9 February 2011 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Georgia.


Upcoming Events

13 - 18 March 2011: 40th International Public ICANN Meeting - San Francisco, CA, USA

About ICANN

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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."