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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 7 March 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Publishes Quarterly Financial Report (Q2) for Fiscal Year 2014

7 March 2014 | ICANN achieves another milestone in its financial accountability and transparency, with the publication of its quarterly (Q2) financial statements report.

Bulk Transfer of Domain Names from Asadal, Inc. to Gabia, Inc.

5 March 2014 | ICANN has authorized the bulk transfer of gTLD domain names from Asadal, Inc. to Gabia, Inc. due to compliance actions taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of Asadal, Inc.

UPDATED: WEBINAR – Opportunities and Challenges to Keep up with the Internet of the Future – Everything You Need to Know About the ICANN Meeting in Singapore

5 March 2014 | Please join ICANN Vice Presidents Yu-Chuang Kuek and Christopher Mondini for a pre-ICANN 49 webinar for business participants.

Publication of One World Trust Report on ICANN Accountability Benchmarks and Metrics

4 March 2014 | One World Trust (OWT) has submitted an independent assessment and measurement recommendations to ICANN. OWT was contracted to assist with developing a means to measure ICANN's accountability performance over time, as well as relative to other (broadly) similar organizations.

IRTP Part D PDP WG Initial Report Public Comment Opened

3 March 2014 | This Public Forum invites comments on the Initial Report on the IRTP Part D PDP. The Report provides 12 preliminary recommendations to the six questions that this PDP Working Group (WG) was charted with.

IDN Variant TLDs – LGR Procedure Implementation – Maximal Starting Repertoire Version 1 is Now Open for Public Comment

3 March 2014 | As first deliverable under the "Procedure to Develop and Maintain Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone With Respect to IDN Labels" (the Procedure), ICANN is releasing for public comment version 1 of the Maximal Starting Repertoire (MSR-1).

Ashwin Rangan to Join ICANN as New Chief Innovation and Information Officer

3 March 2014 | Veteran business leader Ashwin Rangan has joined ICANN as its first Chief Innovation and Information Officer. Rangan assumes the new role on March 3, 2014 and will report directly to President and CEO Fadi Chehadé.


Upcoming Events

23-27 March 2014: 49th International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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 FY14 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."