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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 18 April 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN 51 in Los Angeles California

18 April 2014 | The ICANN Fellowship program seeks participants from developing countries of the world in order to help create a broader base of knowledgeable constituents to engage in the multi-stakeholder process and become the new voice of experience in their regions and beyond.

ICANN Begins Transition To New Website

17 April 2014 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced the beginning of a transition to a new ICANN.org website.

Proposed Changes to the Inter-Registrar Policy (Watch the Video & Provide Comments)

14 April 2014 | The public comment period for the IRTP-D Working Group's Initial Report closes on 25 April 2014 at 23:59 UTC.

Internationalized Registration Data Expert Working Group Interim Report Public Comment Opened

14 April 2014 | This Public Forum invites comments on the Interim Report from Whois review team internationalized registration data expert working group. The Report proposes internationalization requirements for fourteen categories of data elements currently outputted by the various gTLD registration data directory services.

IDN ccTLD Request From Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic Of, Successfully Passes String Evaluation

14 April 2014 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic Of.


Upcoming Events

22-26 June 2014: 50th International Public ICANN Meeting – London

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."