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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 17 August 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN | Fellows Announced for Toronto, Canada Meeting

17 August 2012 | 27 fellows from 24 countries have been selected to participate in ICANN's Fellowship program at the 45th Public Meeting in Toronto, Canada, 14-19 October.

Period of 16 – 26 August 2012: Public Comment Periods Recently Opened and Approaching Closing Date

16 August 2012 | The Following Public Comment periods are Recently Opened or are approaching their Comment or Reply Period Close dates between 16 - 26 August 2012.

DSSA Working Group Phase 1 Report

14 August 2012 | The DNS Security & Stability Analysis (DSSA) Working Group is seeking community comment on its Phase 1 Report.

New gTLD Progress Report

13 August 2012 | Did you miss our webinar for applicants last week? You can watch it here: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/webinars
We’ll be holding more webinars to keep you informed of important developments as new generic top-level domains advance toward inclusion in the Internet.


Upcoming Events

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

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, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 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."