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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 28 March 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Historic Singapore Meeting Marks the Beginning a New Phase for ICANN

28 March 2014 | Singapore… The President and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) says the organization's 49th meeting that just concluded in Singapore marked the beginning of a new era for the organization and the future of Internet governance.

Singapore GAC Communiqué

27 March 2014 | The Governmental Advisory Committee meeting at ICANN 49 in Singapore has issued its Singapore Communiqué.

".Africa" Signing Ceremony Held at ICANN 49

26 March 2014 | At ICANN 49 in Singapore today Akram Atallah, president of ICANN's Global Domains Division (GDD) and Lucky Masilela, CEO of ZA Central Registry (ZACR) participated in a symbolic signing ceremony that allows the new gTLD ".Africa" to proceed to delegation.

The Future of Internet Governance Dominates Opening of ICANN's Singapore Meeting

24 March 2014 | Singapore…The process of determining how best to transfer stewardship of key Internet technical functions from the U.S. Government to the International community began today during ICANN's 49th public meeting in Singapore.

175+ New gTLDs Delegated

24 March 2014 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced at ICANN 49 in Singapore that the number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that have been delegated now tops 175.

Upcoming Events

22-26 June 2014: 50th International Public ICANN Meeting – London

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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."