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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 February 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Briefing Note on the ICANN New Delhi Meeting

22 February 2008 | ICANN staff has produced a briefing note on the New Delhi meeting of 10-15 February 2008.

ICANN Announces Regional Outreach Meeting 1-3 April 2008 in Dubai, UAE

21 February 2008 | ICANN is holding the second of two regional outreach meetings planned for FY07-08. This second regional meeting will be held in Dubai from 1 to 3 April 2008.


ICANN in the News

These links lead to external news stories. ICANN is not responsible for the content of these pages.

Soon, the Net could get a truly Hindi identity (livemint.com)

18 February 2008 | India could be among the first few countries in the world to have internationalized, or multilingual, Internet domain names represented by local language characters such as those from the Devanagari script on which Hindi is based instead of widely used Latin characters such as in English.

Non-English domains still unsettled (BusinessWeek)

15 February 2008 | Weeklong discussions in India about the creation of online domain names entirely in languages other than English led to greater understanding but no major decisions, the chief executive of the Internet's key oversight agency said Friday.


Upcoming Events

1 - 3 April 2008 - ICANN Regional Outreach Meeting - Dubai, UAE

7 - 11 April 2008 - AFTLD Meeting - Johannesburg, South Africa

22 - 27 June: 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Paris, France


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, July 2007 - June 2010

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008

Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008 [PDF, 426 KB]


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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."