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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 21 December 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Update: ICANN Projects Under Way to Improve Whois Accuracy

21 December 2007 | Compliance projects, intended to improve Whois data accuracy and Whois service accessibility, are under way by ICANN.

ICANN Calls for Expressions of Interest from Potential Dispute Resolution Service Providers for the New gTLD Program

21 December 2007 | ICANN is calling for Expressions of Interest from potential Dispute Resolution Service Providers (DSRP) for the new gTLD Program.

New gTLD Program Updates

21 December 2007 | ICANN describes progress in developing potential implementation models of the GNSO Policy recommendations for the introduction of new gTLDs

Request to Provide Input to Issue Report on Introduction of IDN ccTLDs

19 December 2007 | At its meeting on 2 October 2007, the ccNSO Council resolved to call for an Issue Report to examine the need for a Policy Development Process (ccPDP).

Notice of Implementation Date for WHOIS National Laws Procedure

18 December 2007 | ICANN is publishing a notice of implementation of the ICANN Procedure for Handling WHOIS Conflicts with Privacy Law.


Upcoming Events

10 February - 15 February 2008: 31st International Public ICANN Meeting - New Delhi, India


About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008

Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008 [PDF, 426 KB]


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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."