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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 29 November 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Study on Whois Misuse

27 November 2013 | This study, conducted by Carnegie Mellon University's Cylab (CMU), examines the extent to which public Whois contact information for gTLD domain names is misused (i.e. harmful actions such as spam, phishing, identity theft or data theft are taken using gTLD registration data).

Protection of IGO and INGO Identifiers in All gTLDs (PDP) Recommendations for Board Consideration

27 November 2013 | To obtain community input on the recommendations recently adopted by the GNSO Council concerning the Protection of IGO and INGO Identifiers in All gTLDs Policy Development Process prior to their consideration by the ICANN Board of Directors.

Upcoming Events

23-27 March 2014: 49th International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 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."