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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 23 December 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN

23 December 2011 | For this 15th round of the Fellowship Program, 29 fellows have been selected from 24 countries, chosen amongst the 116 applications received.

Continued Operations Instrument Guidelines Available for New gTLD Applicants

23 December 2011 | As part of the new gTLD program, all new gTLD applicants are required to provide a cost estimate for funding critical registry functions on an annual basis in case of registry failure.

Public Comment: IDN Variant Issues Project: Draft Integrated Issues Report

23 December 2011 | ICANN published for public comment the draft Integrated Issues Report, a study of the issues that this project has identified in relation to the management of IDN variant TLDs. It represents the result of the completion of the second phase of the project.

Apply Now for ICANN's Leadership Positions

23 December 2011 | Apply now to join the ICANN Board, the Councils of GNSO and ccNSO, and the ALAC.

New Year Brings More Public Comment Enhancements to Life, Addressing Four ATRT Recommendations

22 December 2011 | The following new changes are the capstone on a series of improvements made to the Public Comment Process over the past six months: Better Descriptions of Public Comment Topics and Comment/Reply Periods. These new processes and constructs will be put in place by 1 January 2012.

2011 Annual Report Published

21 December 2011 | The 2011 Annual Report for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been published online today.

Further Progress by the CEO Search Committee

20 December 2011 | The CEO Search Committee has now completed a job description for the position of CEO and a CEO candidate profile.

Public Comment: New gTLD Applicant Support Program: Financial Assistance

20 December 2011 | ICANN is introducing today for public comment the implementation plans for the gTLD Applicant Support Program.

Upcoming Events

11 - 16 March 2012: 43rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Costa Rica

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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."