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Announcements

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...

U.S. Federal Court Denies Plaintiffs' Request for Preliminary Injunction in Dotster v. ICANN Lawsuit

Marina del Rey, California, USA (13 November 2003) – In a strongly worded ruling, a U.S. Federal...

ICANN Announces Appointment of General Manager, IANA

ICANN is pleased to announce that Mr. Doug Barton will be joining the company as General...

ICANN Mourns Loss of Former Board Member

The ICANN Board mourns the loss of its former member and colleague, Hans Kraaijenbrink, who...

ICANN Board Organizational Meeting in Carthage, Tunisia

Election of Board Chairman

Whereas the Board Governance Committee has unanimously recommended...

ICANN Board Resolutions in Carthage, Tunisia

ICANN's Board of Directors met on 31 October 2003 in Carthage, Tunisia.

The Board adopted the...

ICANN Launches Broad Strategic Initiative for New Generic Top-Level Domains

Carthage, Tunisia – ICANN announced it will launch a broad strategic initiative to enable new...

ICANN Appoints New Vice President Of Supporting Organization and Committee Support | ICANN to Open Office in Brussels, Belgium

Tunis, Tunisia – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announces that...

Advisory Concerning Registry Request for Authorization to Offer IDN Registrations

Pursuant to the Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names and ICANN...

 |  Announcement, IDN

President Appoints Joint Working Group for WIPO-2 Process Issues

Dr. Paul Twomey, ICANN's President, is pleased to announce a Joint Working Group concerning the...

Advisory Concerning Demand to Remove VeriSign's Wildcard

On 15 September 2003, VeriSign unilaterally instituted a number of changes to the .com and .net...

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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."