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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 September 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Second Public Comments Period Begins on Improving Institutional Confidence in ICANN

19 September 2008 | The Improving Institutional Confidence (IIC) in ICANN consultation has entered a second public comment period that will run until Monday 20 October 2008.

Application Round Opens for Mexico City Meeting Fellowships

18 September 2008 | ICANN has launched its latest round of fellowship program applications for its 34th International Public Meeting to be held in Mexico City from 1-6 March 2009.

#1 Domain Names International/1dni.com Transfers Domains to Tucows

18 September 2008 | 1DNI requested that its names be transferred to registrar Tucows Inc. In following the Draft/Interim Terminated Registrar Transition Procedure, ICANN determined that the requested transfer will "promote the community interest," as described in Part B of the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, and accordingly, has approved the bulk transfer.

Fast Track Final Report Published with Public Comment

17 September 2008 | As part of its commitment to keep the community full informed on public policy matters of significant interest, the ICANN staff has prepared and posted a consolidated overview of public comments submitted on the Final Report of the IDNC Working Group on ccTLD Fast Track Mechanisms.

RFP for Independent Review of SSAC Posted

16 September 2008 | As part of its commitment to ongoing improvement through its program of reviews, ICANN is today posting a Request for Proposal (RFP) for an independent reviewer of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee.

Public Comment Period Now Open for Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy Denials Definitions PDP

15 September 2008 | The public is invited to submit comments until 6 October 2008 before final consideration by the Board.

Upcoming Events

2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt

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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."