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Announcements

ICANN62 Panama City GAC Communiqué

PANAMA CITY – 28 June 2018 – Today, the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) meeting...

 |  Announcement, Government

German Regional Court to Revisit Ruling in Injunction Proceedings on Request to Preserve WHOIS data

LOS ANGELES – 21 June 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers...

 |  Government, WHOIS

German Court Rules on ICANN Request to Preserve WHOIS Data

LOS ANGELES – 30 May 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers...

 |  Government, WHOIS

ICANN Files Legal Action in Germany to Preserve WHOIS Data

LOS ANGELES – 25 May 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers...

 |  Government, WHOIS

ICANN Holds First Capacity Development Workshop for Asia GAC Members

SINGAPORE – 15 February 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and...

 |  Announcement, Government

Implementation of the Consensus Policy for Protection of Certain Specific IGO and INGO Identifiers for All gTLDs

LOS ANGELES – 16 January 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and...

 |  Announcement, Civil Society, Government, Technology

Public Comment Period Extended: Operating Standards for ICANN's Specific Reviews

LOS ANGELES – 8 January 2018 – The deadline to submit comments on the Operating...

 |  Announcement, Civil Society, Developing World, DNS Marketplace, Government, Technology

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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."