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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 17 January 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

WEBINAR: ICANN Strategy Panel on Identifier Technology Innovation

17 January 2014 | You are invited to an update on the activities of the Strategy Panel on Identifier Technology Innovation. ICANN Strategy Panels' work will inform ICANN's new, overarching vision and five-year strategic plan.

IANA Functions Satisfaction Survey Yields Overwhelmingly Positive Results

15 January 2014 | ICANN is reporting extremely high levels of customer satisfaction according to the results of the 2013 Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions Customer Satisfaction Survey.

The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, São Paulo – Conference Update

11 January 2014 | The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance will take place in São Paulo, Brazil on April 23rd and 24th 2014. This meeting will focus on crafting Internet governance principles and proposing a roadmap for the further evolution of the Internet governance ecosystem.


Upcoming Events

23-27 March 2014: 49th International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY14 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."