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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 16 August 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

NGPC Begins Consideration of GAC Durban Advice on New gTLDs

16 August 2013 | The ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) met on 13 August 2013 to begin consideration of the GAC's further advice regarding new gTLD applications in the GAC Durban Communiqué, issued on 18 July 2013.

Affirmation of Commitment Reviews Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT-RT) | Call for Volunteer Members: Representing ICANN Advisory Committees and Supporting Organizations; and Serving as Independent Experts

16 August 2013 | In line with the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC) requirements, and as directed by the ICANN Board, ICANN invites interested individuals to apply for volunteer Review Team Member positions – either in representation of a Supporting Organization or Advisory Committee, or as an Independent Expert – to serve on the Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT-RT).

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN | Fellows Announced for Buenos Aires Meeting

12 August 2013 | 35 fellows from 27 countries have been selected to participate in ICANN's Fellowship program at the 48th Public Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 17-21 November 2013.

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."