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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 15 November 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Experts Address the Global Expansion of the Internet

15 November 2013 | Buenos Aires, Argentina… ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé, Board Chair Dr. Stephen Crocker, President of Generic Domains Division Akram Atallah and Vice President Stakeholder Engagement for Latin America and the Caribbean Rodrigo de la Parra will address major issues shaping the Internet's future at a news conference on Wednesday, 20 November at 11:30 AM (ART).

The Nominating Committee Announces Selection of a Member to the ICANN Board of Directors

15 November 2013 | The 2013 Nominating Committee (NomCom) is pleased to announce the selection of Wolfgang Kleinwächter as a member to the ICANN Board of Directors.

ICANN Selects Lead for Development of Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework

11 November 2013 | ICANN signed an agreement with JAS Global Advisors LLC to lead the development of the Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework, in cooperation with the community.

Status Update from the Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services

11 November 2013 | The Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services (EWG) has been working to envision a clean-slate approach to better meet global Internet community needs for domain name registration data with greater privacy, accuracy, and accountability.

Upcoming Events

17-21 November 2013: 48th International Public ICANN Meeting - Buenos Aires

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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."