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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 June 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

NTIA IANA Functions' Stewardship Transition – Process to Develop the Proposal and Next Steps

6 June 2014 | ICANN today published a Process to Develop the Proposal and Next Steps that is the culmination of a series of community discussions and input into the process to develop a proposal to transition the IANA functions to the global multistakeholder community.

What to Expect at ICANN 50: A Guide for Business Newcomers

4 June 2014 | Please join ICANN Vice Presidents Jean-Jacques Sahel and Christopher Mondini for a pre-ICANN 50 webinar for business participants.

.WED Registry Agreement Amendment – Introduction of Third Level Domain Sales

4 June 2014 | On 8 October 2013, Atgron, Inc., the registry operator of the .wed TLD, submitted a Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) request to allow the sale of third level domains in the TLD.

ICANN Publishes Quarterly Financial Report (Q3) for Fiscal Year 2014

4 June 2014 | ICANN achieves another milestone in its financial accountability and transparency, with the publication of its quarterly (Q3) financial statements report.

Study to Evaluate Solutions for the Submission and Display of Internationalized Contact Data

3 June 2014 | This Public Forum invites comments on the report of the study conducted to evaluate available solutions for the submission and display of internationalized contact data (such as WHOIS).

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."