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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 August 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN

18 August 2011 | Fellows Announced for Dakar, Senegal Meeting

Accountability & Transparency – "ATRT" – Activities Webinar: 31 August – Hold the Date

17 August 2011 | You are invited to participate in a webinar on changes ICANN is implementing to enhance its accountability and transparency (also known as the Accountability & Transparency Review Team recommendations). The Webinar will be held Wednesday, 31 August, 2011 from 14:00 -- 15:30 UTC and is open to all.

How Should We Raise Global Awareness of New gTLDs? Engage the ICANN Community

17 August 2011 | We would also like to ask community members to recommend events and opportunities to raise awareness of new gTLDs.

Beckstrom to Leave ICANN at End of His Term [PDF, 493 KB]

16 August 2011 | Rod Beckstrom will continue to fulfill his term as ICANN's President and CEO, which will be completed on 1 July 2012.

Public Comment: Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Recommendations for ICANN Board Consideration

15 August 2011 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization approved at its meeting on 21 July 2011 the recommendations on the Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Policy Development Process (PDP). You are invited to submit your comments on these recommendations until 15 September before final consideration by the ICANN Board.


Upcoming Events

23 - 28 October 2011: 42nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Dakar

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, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 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."