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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 January 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN 47 in Durban, South Africa

11 January 2013 | How Do I Apply for the Fellowship Program? The Fellowship Program has demonstrated success in its mission to build capacity in the ICANN multi-stakeholder environment through focused interactive engagement between newcomers to ICANN and community members at each of the ICANN meetings.

Preliminary Issue Report on Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information

8 January 2013 | As a required step in the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Development Process (PDP), ICANN Staff is seeking input on the Preliminary Issue Report on Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information.

ICANN Board-Stakeholder Action List

8 January 2013 | 21 December 2012. The attached ICANN Board-Stakeholder Action List sets out what the Board heard in Toronto where Board action is required and what the Board plans to do.

Buenos Aires, Singapore, London Identified as ICANN Meeting Sites for 2013-14

7 January 2013 | Completing the selection of meeting sites for 2013, the ICANN Board approved Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the location of ICANN’s 48th public meeting, to be held 17-21 November 2013. The Board also approved Singapore, London and a North American city (to be determined) as locations for the organization’s 2014 meetings.

Upcoming Events

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

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 Operating Plan and Budget

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."