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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 12 July 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Call for Generation Panels to Develop Root Zone Label Generation Rules

11 July 2013 | Today, ICANN takes the next step in the implementation of the IDN Root Zone Label Generation Rules Procedure by publishing the Call for Generation Panels to develop Root Zone Label Generation Rules.

Internet Pioneer to Speak About Internet Growth in Africa [PDF, 123 KB]

10 July 2013 | Dr. Nii Quaynor, often referred to as the "Father of the Internet in Africa," will join ICANN CEO and President Fadi Chehadé, Board Chair Dr. Stephen Crocker, and Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement for Africa Pierre Dandjinou at a news conference on Monday, 15 July – the first day of ICANN's 47th public meeting in Durban, South Africa.

Expert Volunteers Needed to Define Requirements for Internationalized Registration Data and Corresponding Data Model for gTLD Registries

8 July 2013 | As part of the process to implement WHOIS review team recommendations related to Internationalized Domain Name registration data requirements, ICANN seeks volunteers who are community representatives with expertise in linguistics, IDNA, policy and registry/registrar operations to participate in a working group to determine appropriate Internationalized Domain Name registration data requirements and data model for Registration Data Directory Services (aka WHOIS services).

Upcoming Events

14 - 18 July 2013: 47th International Public ICANN Meeting - Durban

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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."