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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 12 October 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Registry Stakeholder Group Charter Revisions (Sep 2012)

11 October 2012 | The pubic is invited to review the charter amendments made by the RySG and provide comments to assist the Board in its review of the Charter changes.

Expired Registration Recovery Policy

11 October 2012 | ICANN is opening a Public Comment Period for the draft Expired Registration Recovery Policy. Members of the Internet Community are asked to provide feedback on the proposed document.

Use of a Drawing for Prioritizing New gTLD Applications

10 October 2012 | After careful analysis of public comment and possible solutions for processing new gTLD applications, ICANN is proposing a plan for prioritizing applications through the steps leading to delegation.

Application for New GNSO Constituency Candidacy-"Public Internet Access/Cybercafe Ecosystem"

10 October 2012 | ICANN has received its first application under the New GNSO Constituency Recognition Process adopted by the ICANN Board in June 2011. The purpose of this forum is to notify the ICANN community and solicit feedback on the Application for Candidacy (AFC) submitted by the Cyber Café Association of India (CCAOI), to form a new GNSO Constituency called the "Public Internet Access/Cybercafé Ecosystem (PIA/CC)".

New gTLD Pre-Delegation Testing Provider – Upcoming Request for Proposals

9 October 2012 | ICANN is planning to issue a Request for Proposals to identify a provider for the Pre-Delegation testing that is specified in the gTLD Applicant Guidebook.

ICANN FY12 Audited Financial Statements

8 October 2012 | ICANN continues to provide accountability and transparency regarding its financial results, with another unqualified audit report from independent auditors, Moss Adams LLP.

ICANN Appoints Chair and Chair-Elect for the 2013 Nominating Committee (NomCom)

8 October 2012 | The ICANN Board is pleased to announce that it has appointed Yrjö Länsipuro as Chair and Cheryl Langdon-Orr as Chair-Elect for the 2013 Nominating Committee (NomCom).

Upcoming Events

14 - 19 October 2012: 45th International Public ICANN Meeting - Toronto

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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."