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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 September 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Release of Country and Territory Names within the .NEUSTAR TLD

19 September 2014 | A Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) request was submitted by NeuStar, Inc. to allow the release of country and territory names for the .NEUSTAR top-level domain (TLD). As of 31 July 2014, Specification 13 has been granted for .NEUSTAR indicating that the TLD has .BRAND TLD provisions in place.

IANA Stewardship Coordination Group Publishes Guidelines for Decision-Making

18 September 2014 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) today announced that it has finalized and published the group's Guidelines for Decision Making. The objective of the document is to assist the ICG in optimizing productivity and effectiveness in the process of making decisions.

Results Available for 17 September 2014 New gTLD Program Auction

18 September 2014 | On 17 September 2014, an Auction conducted by ICANN's authorized Auction service provider, Power Auctions LLC, was held to resolve string contention sets for three new generic Top-level Domain (gTLD) strings; BUY, TECH, and VIP.

Proposed Changes to GNSO Operating Procedures

17 September 2014 | To obtain community input on several proposed changes to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Operating Procedures with respect to certain GNSO Council meeting processes (viz. the Council's ability to waive the deadline for submissions of motions for voting, and to vote outside a Council meeting), and to the GNSO Working Group Guidelines with respect to Working Group consensus levels.

Pre-ICANN 51 Policy Update Webinar

17 September 2014 | The ICANN Policy Development Support Team will provide a Policy Update Webinar on Thursday 2 October 2014 at 10:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC, summarizing policy activities across the ICANN policy development community including the ongoing Transition of Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions and the ICANN Accountability track efforts.

ICANN Board Adopts FY15 Operating Plan and Budget

16 September 2014 | The ICANN Board adopted the FY15 Operating Plan and Budget on 09 September 2014. To view the document please visit the Financials page.

ICG Announces Fourth Conference Call

16 September 2014 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) will hold its fourth conference call on Wednesday, 17 September 2014 from 21:30-22:30 UTC.

Alan Greenberg Selected as Next ALAC Chair

15 September 2014 | Alan Greenberg, a long-time member of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), has been selected as the next ALAC Chair. Greenberg replaces Olivier Crépin-Leblond, who has served as ALAC Chair since December 2010. He will begin a one-year, renewable term on October 16, 2014 during the ICANN51 Meeting in Los Angeles.

Upcoming Events

12-16 October 2014: 51st International Public ICANN Meeting – Los Angeles

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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."