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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 14 September 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

New ICANN CEO is Out of the Blocks with Ambitious Operational Plans

14 September 2012 | Los Angeles, California... Fadi Chehadé today officially assumed the position of President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). He assumed his position two weeks ahead of his planned start date.

ICANN Launches Accountability Structures Expert Panel, Seeks Community Input

11 September 2012 | In fulfillment of ATRT Recommendations 23 and 25, calling for a review of ICANN's Accountability Structures, ICANN has identified an international panel of experts to serve on the Accountability Structures Expert Panel (ASEP).

ICANN to Hold Public Meeting in Durban, South Africa in July 2013

10 September 2012 | ICANN's Board of Directors approved Durban, South Africa, as the location for ICANN's 47th Public Meeting to be held 14-19 July 2013.

Upcoming Events

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

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, 2012 – 2015

Adopted FY13 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."