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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 25 December 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

2009 Annual Report Published

24 December 2009 | The 2009 Annual Report for ICANN has been published online.

ICANN Publishes the December 2009 Semi-Annual Contractual Compliance Report

24 December 2009 | ICANN's Contractual Compliance Department published its fourth Semi-Annual Contractual Compliance Report. This report summarizes ICANN's compliance activities from January through November 2009.

Bulk Transfer of OOO Russian Registrar and BP Holdings Group Inc. (dba IS.COM) Domains to Name.com LLC

23 December 2009 | ICANN has authorized a bulk transfer of OOO Russian Registrar's and BP Holdings Group Inc.'s (dba IS.COM) gTLD domain names to Name.com LLC, due to compliance actions taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of two registrars: OOO Russian Registrar and BP Holdings Group Inc.


Upcoming Events

7 - 12 March 2010: 37th International Public ICANN Meeting - Nairobi, Kenya

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

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

Adopted FY10 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."