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First Consultation on a 2-Year Planning Process

Open Date

21 Dec 2018 23:59 UTC

Close Date

5 Mar 2019 23:59 UTC

Staff Report Due

22 Mar 2019 23:59 UTC

Comments Closed

Report of Public Comments

View Comments

Brief Overview

Purpose: Obtain community input on needs and improvements to the planning process.

Current Status: First consultation to evaluate the potential benefit of implementing a 2-year planning process.

Next Steps: After receiving public comments, ICANN org will use the input to develop a proposed planning process that may include a 2-year duration.

Section I: Description and Explanation

In this first consultation, ICANN org seeks community input on a number of questions pertaining to ICANN’s planning process. Please see the questions on 2-year Planning Process Consultation Paper [PDF, 249 KB] before providing your input.

Section II: Background

During discussions on planning, the issue of lacking enough time to allow for more community engagement in the planning process has led to the question of whether extending the planning process from 1 year to 2 years could be helpful. ICANN org is following on the question by initiating a process to first consult and then propose such a planning process.

Section III: Relevant Resources

Section IV: Additional Information

Section V: Reports

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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."