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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 15 May 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Advisory: OnlineNIC Transfer Issues Resolved

15 May 2009 | Customers of registrar OnlineNIC who had problems with previous transfer requests should now be able to transfer their domains to a different registrar if they wish.

Bulk Transfer of Parava Domains to Tucows

14 May 2009 | Tucows Inc. has been selected to manage the name registrations previously managed by Parava Networks, Inc. (dba 10-Domains.com).

Status Overview of IPv4 Block Allocation Published

12 May 2009 | At its meeting on 23 April 2009, the Board resolved to request tracking of the development of a Global Policy Proposal for the Allocation of IPv4 Blocks to Regional Internet Registries, under discussion in the addressing community.

Public Comment: Revised gTLD Registries Stakeholder Petition

11 May 2009 | All members of the ICANN community are now invited to review and compare two RySG submissions and share comments and observations with the ICANN Board and the wider community through 10 June 2009.


Upcoming Events

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."