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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 28 February 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

WEBINAR: ICANN Strategy Panels – Draft Reports

28 February 2014 | Vint Cerf, Nii Quaynor, Beth Noveck and Paul Mockapetris invite you to join them on Tuesday, 11 March at 15:00-16:30 UTC for an overview of the draft recommendations and report they respectively released earlier this month for public comment.

Independent Report Maps Possible Way Forward in Mitigating Domain Name Collisions

26 February 2014 | An independent report commissioned by ICANN, Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions, has offered a set of concrete recommendations on how to mitigate potential risks of domain name collisions.

Video: Details on the Globalization Advisory Groups

25 February 2014 | In a video interview, Theresa Swinehart, Senior Advisory to the President on Global Strategy, explains the rationale behind the creation of Globalization Advisory Groups and how they will provide guidance on globalization issues.

Quick Look at Strategy Panel Recommendations – Provide Your Comments Today

25 February 2014 | More than 40 diverse practitioners, subject matter experts and thought leaders have been working together since October 2013 as members of the ICANN Strategy Panels to support development of ICANN's strategic and operational future. Each of the four panels has now published its draft recommendations, which are being translated into the five additional UN languages and are open for public comment.

ICANN Future Meetings Strategy

25 February 2014 | The purpose of this document is to help guide the Community through a proposed new strategy for the structure, purpose and locations of the ICANN public meetings to support broad, informed participation and reflect the functional, geographic, and cultural diversity of the Internet at all levels of policy development and decision-making.

Update to BCG Study – Country-by-Country Analysis Now Available

24 February 2014 | Greasing the Wheels of the Internet Economy, a report by Boston Consulting Group and commissioned by ICANN, ranked 65 different countries according to four different types of e-friction. The full analysis of each country's ranking is now available for download.

Pre-Singapore ICANN Policy Update Webinar Invitation

24 February 2014 | The ICANN Policy Staff will provide a briefing on Thursday 13 March at 12:00 UTC and Thursday 13 March at 19:00 UTC, summarizing policy issues across the different ICANN Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees.


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."