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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 8 April 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN

8 April 2011 | Global participation and ideas will be on the rise at the 41st Public Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers thanks to ICANN's on-going Fellowship Program.

Public Comment: Proposed ICANN Bylaw Revisions Regarding the ALAC

8 April 2011 | As part of the ALAC/At-Large Improvements Project, the Office of the General Counsel – in coordination with the ALAC, At-Large Improvements Work Team A, and the At-Large Staff – drafted proposed Bylaw revisions to reflect the ALAC's continuing purpose within ICANN.

Araneus Information Systems Report on Root Zone Glue Handling

7 April 2011 | The "Report on Root Zone Glue Handling" makes a useful contribution to an ongoing discussion within the DNS community regarding the most appropriate way to manage glue changes in the root zone and their complexities. ICANN makes no comment on its proposed solutions, but feels the report adds to an understanding of the challenges in making changes to the current root zone glue management process. For that reason, ICANN wishes to share this Report with the DNS stakeholders.

ICANN 2010 Annual Report [PDF, 11 MB]

5 April 2011 | ICANN releases their 2010 Annual Report.

Bulk Transfer of Domain Names from Blue Gravity Communications and Moozooy Media to NamesBeyond.com

5 April 2011 | ICANN has authorized the bulk transfers of Blue Gravity Communications, Inc.'s and Moozooy Media Inc's gTLD domain names to 2030138 Ontario Inc. dba NamesBeyond.com ("NamesBeyond"), due to a compliance action taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of registrars Blue Gravity Communications and Moozooy Media Inc.

Global Policy Proposal for the Allocation of IPv4 by IANA Post Exhaustion - Background Report, 4 April 2011

4 April 2011 | Second proposal for handling recovered IPv4 address space.

ICANN Nominating Committee Candidate Recruitment Period Ends Today, 4 April 2011

4 April 2011 | The 2011 Nominating Committee application period closed Monday, April 4 at 23:59 UTC.

Upcoming Events

19 - 24 June 2011: 41st International Public ICANN Meeting - Singapore

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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."