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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 November 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Experts to Discuss Benefits of Open Internet

20 November 2013 | Buenos Aires, Argentina… ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé, ICANN Board Member Olga Madruga-Forti and LACNIC President Oscar Messano will participate in a panel focused on the business opportunities that are only possible on a free and open Internet.

New ICANN 48 Session Added

19 November 2013 | Another session has been added to Wednesday's meeting schedule. At 07:00 ART (10:00 UTC) tomorrow, the ICANN community is invited to attend a session discussing the multistakeholder meeting in Brazil.

Internet Governance Takes Center Stage at ICANN's Buenos Aires Meeting

18 November 2013 | Buenos Aires, Argentina… The future of Internet governance took on a new priority at the opening of ICANN's 48th Public Meeting, ahead of an April conference on Internet governance in Brazil. More than 1,700 people from around the world are attending the ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires.

High-Level Panel Organizes to Address Future of Internet Governance

17 November 2013 | LOS ANGELES – A diverse global group of stakeholders from government, civil society, the private sector, the technical community and international organizations has formed a Panel on the Future of Global Internet Cooperation.

Second Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT 2) Draft Report & Recommendations: Announcement of Correction

17 November 2013 | A correction was issued on 7 November 2013 by the Second Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT2) to their report dated 15 October 2013.

Upcoming Events

23-27 March 2014: 49th International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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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."