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  • Clarifying the Roles of the ICANN Complaints Office and Ombudsman

    Last month, the ICANN organization officially launched its Complaints Office, which serves a complimentary role to ICANN’s existing complaints processes, such as Contractual Compliance, Request for Reconsideration and the Ombudsman. However, we have noticed some confusion...

  • Community Anti-Harassment Policy

    The ICANN Board unanimous passed a resolution at ICANN58, effectively putting into place the new ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy that not only supports ICANN’s Expected Standards of Behavior, but now gives community members recourse if they identify or are victims...

  • Am I Being Respectful and Constructive?

    Anybody who has volunteered to coach an amateur or school team knows what it is like to have the crowd scream insults or profanity at them. The attack comes across without fail as a personal attack; one of bullying and intimidation of the volunteer coach. The fact the...

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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."