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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 20 December 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Publishes Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2013

18 December 2013 | The 2013 Annual Report for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been published online today. The report highlights the organization's achievements and progress from 1 July 2012 to 30 June 2013.

New gTLD Auction Rules

17 December 2013 | To gather community input regarding the detailed rules and processes for Auctions to resolve string contention sets in the New gTLD Program.

ICANN At-Large Begins Search for Board Member

16 December 2013 | Los Angeles, California…ICANN's At-Large Community is beginning a search for an appointee to the ICANN Board of Directors. ALAC is looking for someone with a broad international perspective and a background in Internet users' interests, consumer policy and/or civil society worldwide.

The At-Large Community Seeks Expressions of Interest for Candidates for Post of ICANN Board Seat

16 December 2013 | A call for Expressions of Interest (EoIs) is now open through December 26, 2013. This Call for EoIs is part of the process through which the user community within ICANN will appoint one voting member of the ICANN Board.


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."