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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 18 October 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Indian Center for DNS Security Announced

17 October 2013 | New Delhi, India… ICANN today announced, in partnership with the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), plans to coordinate on the creation of a Center of Excellence in Domain Name System Security in India.

ICANN Announces Membership and Frameworks for Strategy Panels

14 October 2013 | Los Angeles, California… ICANN today announced the membership and operating timeframe for four strategy panels. ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer Fadi Chehadé announced creation of the panels during the organization's July meeting in Durban, South Africa. Chehadé said they will bring together subject matter experts, thought leaders and industry practitioners to help transform and guide ICANN's five year strategic plan.

ICANN Announces Strategy Panel Members

14 October 2013 | ICANN welcomes over 40 diverse practitioners, subject matter experts, and thought leaders as members of the ICANN Strategy Panels to support development of ICANN's strategic and operational plans.

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."