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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 May 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

IDN Variant TLD Program - Revised Program Plan

4 May 2012 | The purpose of this project is to resolve many of the issues necessary to delegate variant TLDs.

TAS Interruption - Update (4 May 2012)

4 May 2012 | The TLD Application System, or TAS, held 2091 applications - either submitted or in progress - when it was taken offline on 12 April 2012.

Period of 03-13 May 2012: Public Comment Periods Approaching Closing Date

3 May 2012 | The Following Public Comment periods are approaching their Comment or Reply Period Close dates, May 03-13 2012.

TAS Interruption - Update (2 May 2012)

2 May 2012 | ICANN is in the process of notifying applicants whether they were affected by the software glitch that caused us to take the TLD Application System, or TAS, offline. As we announced earlier this week, we plan to complete this notification process on or before 8 May.

Security, Stability & Resiliency of the DNS Review Team (SSR RT) Public Webinars on Draft Report

2 May 2012 | Consistent with its initial announcement, the SSR Review Team now invites the Community to participate in a public webinar with a view to presenting its draft report and recommendations and soliciting the Community's feedback on its findings and conclusions.

ICANN Draft FY13 Operating Plan and Budget

1 May 2012 | ICANN's annual operating plan and budget describes the planned activities and required resources for the fiscal year.

ICANN Wraps Up Prague Meeting on Thursday

30 April 2012 | The Friday morning program, which in the past has comprised AC/SO committee reports, Board committee reports, and the public Board meeting, has been removed.


Upcoming Events

24 - 29 June 2012: 44th International Public ICANN Meeting - Prague

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."