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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 27 July 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Bulk Transfer of Domain Names from Planet Online and Name For Name to NamesBeyond

27 July 2012 | ICANN has authorized the bulk transfer of Planet Online Corp'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 registrar Planet Online Corp.

Period of 26 July - 05 August 2012: Public Comment Periods Approaching Closing Date

26 July 2012 | The Following Public Comment periods are approaching their Comment or Reply Period Close dates, 26 July - 05 August 2012.

Locking of a Domain Name Subject to UDRP Proceedings

25 July 2012 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Locking of a Domain Name Subject to UDRP Proceedings Working Group is looking for public input in order to have a clear understanding of the exact nature and scope of issues encountered with the locking of a domain name subject to UDRP Proceedings.

Preliminary Issue Report on Uniformity of Contracts to Address Registration Abuse

25 July 2012 | At its October meeting last year the GNSO Council requested an Issue Report to evaluate whether a minimum baseline of registration abuse provisions should be created for all in scope ICANN agreements, and if created, how such language would be structured to address the most common forms of registration abuse.

Upcoming Events

14 - 19 October 2012: 45th International Public ICANN Meeting - Toronto

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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."