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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 March 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

FY13 SO-AC-SG Additional Budget Requests

9 March 2012 | As part of the FY13 Operating Plan and Budget development process, there was an opportunity for the Supporting Organizations, Advisory Committees, and Stakeholder Groups to provide input into the Budget, specifically regarding funding requests for activities beyond the scope of basic services which are provided to all stakeholder and constituency groups.

Contractual Compliance Update

8 March 2012 | In advance of the Costa Rica meeting, the Contractual Compliance team has posted its March 2012 Newsletter with updates on recent activities, including the addition of new staff and the issue of a suspension notice to a registrar.

Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla to Address ICANN Public Meeting [PDF, 292 KB]

8 March 2012 | Costa Rica’s 49th President, Laura Chinchilla, will address the opening session of ICANN's public meeting when it convenes in San Jose on Monday, 12 March.

ICANN Leaders to Give Update on New Generic Top-Level Domain Name Program [PDF, 283 KB]

8 March 2012 | CEO and Board Chair Will Answer Journalists' Questions At Costa Rica News Conference.


Upcoming Events

11 - 16 March 2012: 43rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Costa Rica

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, 2011 - 2014

Adopted FY12 Operating Plan and Budget

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."