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Announcements

ICANN Statement: ICANN Has Successfully Completed All Its Objectives under the MOU to Date

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (19 July 2004) – ICANN, the global public-benefit non-profit organisation...

Advisory | Inter-Registrar Transfers: Implementation Requirements | ICANN announces implementation of new policy rules for transfer of domain names between registrars

July 12, 2004: ICANN is pleased to announce the adoption of The Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy....

ICANN Nominating Committee Issues Formal Call for Recommendations and Statements of Interest

The ICANN Nominating Committee invites Recommendations and Statements of Interest from the...

Final Procedure for Designating Subsequent .net Registry Operator

Introduction

The following outlines the final procedure to be followed for the designation of a...

Final Public Comment Period begins on Draft Criteria for .net

The GNSO has continued the work to provide the ICANN Board with guidance on the criteria for...

Draft Procedure for Designating Subsequent .net Registry Operator

Introduction

The following outlines the draft procedure to be followed for the designation of a...

First Public Comment Period begins on Draft Criteria for .net

The GNSO has completed initial work to provide the ICANN Board with guidance on the criteria...

ICANN publishes criteria for selecting independent evaluators of sTLD proposals.

6 May 2004


ICANN is selecting a team of outside technical, business/financial and legal...

Public Comment period for sTLD applications has been extended

ICANN has extended its Public Comment period for all of the new sTLD applications until 23.59...

ICANN Issues Call for Transfer Dispute Resolution Service Providers

ICANN is seeking expressions of interest from dispute resolution service providers wishing to...

2004 Nominating Committee Begins Work with New Chair

At its Board meeting in Rome, ICANN announced the appointment of Jean-Jacques Damlamian as...

Details on July 2004 ICANN Meeting to be Held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

ICANN's next round of meetings will be held 19-23 July 2004 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The...

Announcement | ICANN Calls for Proposals to Host Meetings in 2005 and 2006

ICANN is actively soliciting proposals from organizations seeking to host an ICANN Board of...

Announcement | Letter of Intent by ICANN and the NRO

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Number Resource...

ICANN Releases Request for Proposals for Sponsored Top Level Domain Names

ICANN is inviting applications from all parties wishing to apply for new sTLDs. Interested...

Announcement | ICANN Announces Business Relationships

ICANN announces a series of consulting agreements to enable and assist ICANN staff to move...

Announcement | Public Comment on Sponsored TLD Applications Opens 31 March 2004

As previously stated, ICANN has received 10 applications for sponsored Top-Level Domain names. A...

ICANN: Progress in Process for Introducing New Sponsored Top-Level Domains

ICANN today announced that, in response to a request for proposals, it has received ten...

Announcement | ICANN Extends Global Outreach During Rome Meeting

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held its first meeting of 2004...

New sTLD RFP Update

At its open Public Forum in Rome, Italy today, ICANN issued an update on the New sTLD...

Announcement | Internet Users Today Get An Additional Voice In How the Internet Develops | ICANN Certifies "At-Large Structures" in Africa, Europe

23 February 2004 - Furthering ICANN's goal to give the world's Internet users a stronger voice...

Advisory | Internationalized Domain Names (IDN): Implementation Update | ICANN approves temporary procedures to improve the transfer mechanism for IDN registrations

This is an important notice to registrants holding Internationalized Domain Name (IDN)...

 |  Announcement, IDN

New ICANN Staff Appointments

Details on March 2004 ICANN Meeting to be Held in Rome, Italy

ICANN's next round of meetings will be held 2-6 March 2004 in Rome, Italy. The meetings are...

ICANN Releases Request for Proposals for Sponsored Top Level Domain Names

ICANN is inviting applications from all parties wishing to apply for new sTLDs. Interested...

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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."