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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 26 September 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Call for Observers to Join Cross Community Working Group to Develop an IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal on Naming Related Functions

26 September 2014 | The organizations that have adopted the charter for the Cross Community Working Group (CWG) to develop an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Stewardship Transition Proposal on Naming Related Functions call for observers to join this effort.

Chinese Community Steps Forward for Chinese TLDs - Forms Generation Panel for Root Zone Label Generation Ruleset (LGR)

24 September 2014 | ICANN is pleased to announce that the Generation Panel for the Chinese Script Root Zone Label Generation Rules (LGR) has been seated.

Extended: GNSO Review 360 Assessment - Participate and Make Your Voice Heard!

23 September 2014 | The GNSO Review 360 Assessment has been extended until 17-October-2014 23:59 UTC to give everyone an opportunity to provide feedback. Gaining useful feedback from a diverse and representative group of people is the cornerstone of ICANN's bottom-up multistakeholder model.

IDN ccTLD Request from the Republic of Iraq Successfully Passes String Evaluation

23 September 2014 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for the Republic of Iraq.

Subsequent New gTLD Program Activities under Consideration – Initial Work Plan Published

22 September 2014 | ICANN today published a draft Work Plan to describe the set of community reviews and activities underway and planned to support consideration of an additional application process for the next round of generic top-level domain (gTLD) names under the New gTLD Program.

What to Expect at ICANN 51: A Guide for Business Stakeholders

22 September 2014 | Please join ICANN's North American engagement team, Christopher Mondini and Joseph Catapano, for a pre-ICANN 51 webinar for business participants.

Upcoming ICG Events

22 September 2014 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) will hold its fifth conference call on Wednesday, 1 October 2014 from 04:00-05:00 UTC.

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."