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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 October 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Review of IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process

22 October 2010 | We are nearing the one-year anniversary date (16 November 2010) of the launch of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process. The Final Implementation Plan for the Fast Track Process requires that the process undergo review annually. ICANN is now opening a public comments forum on the review of the process.

Updated New gTLD Budget Published

22 October 2010 | The New gTLD Budget is a critical component of the program and has been recently updated following public comment and additional analysis. The document is an analysis of the New gTLD program costs, including an assessment of the timing required to complete certain remaining activities necessary for operational readiness.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

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Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."