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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 26 March 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Report of Possible Process Options for Further Consideration of the ICM Application for the .XXX sTLD

26 March 2010 | On 19 February 2010, the Independent Review Panel issued its Declaration in the Independent Review filed by ICM Registry challenging ICANN's denial of ICM's application for the .XXX sTLD.

Nairobi Fellowship Program Reaches Successful Conclusion

26 March 2010 | Twenty-one fellows participated in the 37th ICANN International Public Meeting held March 7-12 in Nairobi, Kenya.

ICANN Formalizes Relationship with ccTLD Manager for Georgia (.GE)

25 March 2010 | ICANN has announced today that it has signed an exchange of letters with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .GE, Caucasus Online LLC., on 22 March 2010.

IDN ccTLD Requests Completes Fast Track String Evaluation

23 March 2010 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLDs.

Proposed Implementation Plan for Synchronized IDN ccTLDs

22 March 2010 | ICANN is pleased to announce the public comment period for the proposed Implementation Plan for Synchronized IDN ccTLDs.


Upcoming Events

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

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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."