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Announcements

.NET RFP Question Period is Open

Marina del Rey (December 15, 2004) – ICANN has opened the online question period for applicants...

ICANN Moves Forward in First Phase Commercial & Technical Negotiations with Two Additional sTLD Applicants

ICANN is pleased to announce that the independent evaluation process, which began earlier this...

ICANN Successfully Concludes Cape Town Meetings

Cape Town, South Africa. This week over 735 participants from 91 countries successfully...

ICANN Extends .NET RFP Public Comment

Marina del Rey (December 1, 2004) . ICANN has extended the public comment period for the .NET...

ICANN Announces Selection of Ombudsman

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is pleased to announce that...

New ICANN Staff Appointments: Human Resources and Chief Registrar Liaison

Andrew Savage
Human Resources...

ICANN Releases Strategic Plan for Public Comment

Marina del Rey (November 16, 2004)–ICANN has released for public comment a draft of the three...

ICANN Domain Name Transfer Policy Becomes Effective

Marina del Rey (November 12, 2004) – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers...

ICANN Releases .NET RFP for Public Comment

Marina del Rey (November 12, 2004) – ICANN has released for public comment a draft of the .NET...

ICANN Takes Steps to Move VeriSign Contract Dispute from Litigation to Arbitration

Marina del Rey (November 12, 2004) – ICANN has initiated efforts to enforce the arbitration...

ICANN Approves Dispute Resolution Providers for Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced today that the Asian...

ICANN Announces Timetable for Release of Strategic Plan

ICANN is preparing to release a proposed three year Strategic Plan. This Strategic Plan sets the...

Details on December 2004 ICANN Meeting to be Held in Cape Town, South Africa

ICANN's next round of meetings will be held 1-5 December 2004 in Cape Town, South Africa. The...

ICANN Moves Forward in First Phase Commercial & Technical Negotiations with Two sTLD Applicants

As the process for selecting new sponsored top-level domain (sTLDs) from a pool of ten...

ASO MoU Signed

Marina del Rey – ICANN is pleased to announce the signing of a formal agreement between the...

Universal Acceptance of all gTLD Names

Some TLD names (strings) are rejected by some service providers or applications because the...

AfriNIC Moves Forward and Promotes Regional Integration

Marina del Ray, Calif. (Oct. 14, 2004) – The African Network Information Center (AfriNIC) has...

Nominating Committee Announces Final Selections For Key Leadership Positions within ICANN

After an intense period of outreach, consultation, recruitment, and evaluation, the Nominating...

Nominating Committee Announces Final Selections For Key Leadership Positions within ICANN

After an intense period of outreach, consultation, recruitment, and evaluation, the Nominating...

Update: ICANN Preparing .NET Redelegation RFP

The current Registry Agreement between ICANN and VeriSign, Inc. which was signed in May 2001...

Advisory: Registrar Expired Name Market Developments

ICANN has issued this advisory to make the community aware of certain changes in the...

Update: Implementation of New Consensus Policies Applicable to gTLD Registrars

This announcement is an update concerning the implementation of four new "Consensus Policies"...

ASO Community Considering Global IANA to RIR IPv6 Address Allocation Policy

Through the Regional Internet number Registry public policy forums, the ASO community is...

ICANN is calling on the African community to provide comments and input on appropriate modes and locations for ICANN regional presence and more significant participation in ICANN activities

Final - 9/16/04- embargo: 530p South Africa, 430p London, 1130a D.C., 830a L.A.

ICANN Highlights...

ICANN Publishes Comprehensive Evaluation of the Introduction of the .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro gTLDs

Evaluation of the New gTLDs:
Policy and Legal Issues

Prepared for the
Internet Corporation for...

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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."