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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 10 October 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Revised Enhancing ICANN Accountability: Process and Next Steps

10 October 2014 | ICANN today published Revised Enhancing ICANN Accountability: Process and Next Steps, a document that describes the process to examine how, from an organizational perspective, ICANN's accountability mechanisms should be strengthened to address the absence of its historical relationship with the U.S. Government.

WHOIS Accuracy Study Preliminary Findings Reflect Improvements in Accuracy

10 October 2014 | In the pilot introduction of the WHOIS Accuracy Reporting System (ARS), ICANN has collaborated with inter-governmental and private sector specialists to deliver the most recent assessment of WHOIS accuracy.

ATRT2 Implementation Program Update

7 October 2014 | We are pleased to provide the first update on the implementation of recommendations from the Second Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT2). ICANN has kicked off the implementation work, following methodology rooted in project management industry standards.


Upcoming Events

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

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."