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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 14 January 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN Public Meeting 41 in Amman, Jordan

14 January 2011 | ICANN is launching the 13th round of the Fellowship program applications for its 41st Public Meeting to be held Amman, Jordan on 19-24 June 2011.

Extension of Public Comment Period on the Draft 2011-2014 Strategic Plan

13 January 2011 | In response to community request, ICANN is extending the Public Comment period on the Draft 2011-2014 Strategic Plan from 45 days to 60 days, which will now close on 25 January 2011, as community input is an important part of our Accountability and Transparency objectives.


Upcoming Events

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

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, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 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."