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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 15 March 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Procedure Introduced

15 March 2013 | Seeking comments on the Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Procedure.

Locking of a Domain Name Subject to UDRP Proceedings – Initial Report

15 March 2013 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization Working Group tasked with addressing the issue of locking of a domain name subject to Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) Proceedings has published its Initial Report for public comment.

Preliminary Issue Report on gTLD Registration Data Services

15 March 2013 | This Public Forum invites comments on the Preliminary Issue Report on gTLD registration data services.

Pre-Beijing New gTLD Update Webinar

12 March 2013 | The New gTLD Program is moving ahead on several tracks at once. Make sure you have the most up-to-date information by participating in this webinar.

ICANN President Announces Major Expansion in Africa [PDF, 204 KB]

11 March 2013 | Addis Ababa, Ethiopia... The President of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said he is moving ahead immediately with plans to have six new ICANN representatives on the African continent.

Upcoming Events

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

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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."