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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 March 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Ombudsman Framework

13 March 2009 | In response to the BGC's recommendation at the Board meeting in Mexico City on 6 March 2009, the Board resolved that the Ombudsman Framework as revised be posted for further public comment and considered at the next possible Board meeting or be returned to the BGC for additional consultation.

Public Comment: Improving Institutional Confidence Plan

12 March 2009 | A public comment period opens today on the draft Implementation Plan for Improving Institutional Confidence produced by the President's Strategy Committee and submitted to the Board of Directors.

Mexico City Briefing Note Published

9 March 2009 | The briefing note summarizes key developments at the meeting and outlines next steps and sources of further information for each.


Upcoming Events

19 March 2009: CENTR General Assembly - Barcelona, Spain

13 - 17 April 2009: AfTLD Meeting - Arusha, Tanzania

21 - 26 June 2009: 35th International Public ICANN Meeting - Sydney, Australia


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

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 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."