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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 5 December 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN 53 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

5 December 2014 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) Fellowship program seeks participants from developing countries interested in the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier system.

IDN TLD‬ Program – Label Generation Ruleset (LGR) Tool Project (P1) – LGR Tool Set Specifications Now Open for Public Comment

3 December 2014 | ICANN intends to develop a tool to allow the Generation Panels and the community to develop and use Label Generation Ruleset (LGR) in the new machine-readable XML-based format.

ICANN Welcomes the EU Council's Conclusions on Internet Governance

2 December 2014 | December 2, 2014 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today welcome the EU Council on Telecommunication (TTE) for its Conclusions on Internet Governance adopted on 27 November 2014.

Seeking Panel Members for New gTLD Public Interest Commitment Dispute Resolution

2 December 2014 | ICANN plans to expand the Standing Panel responsible for administering the Public Interest Commitment Dispute Resolution Procedure (PICDRP), which supports the New gTLD Program.

Call for Volunteers to Participate in Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability)

2 December 2014 | The Cross Community Working Group (CCWG) was formed to deliver proposals that would enhance ICANN's accountability towards all stakeholders. The organizations that chartered the CCWG now call for volunteers to join this effort.

WEBINAR: Cross Community Working Group (CWG) On Naming Related Functions Public Consultation on Draft Transition Proposal

1 December 2014 | In order to brief the community on the contents on this draft transition proposal and encourage community feedback, the CWG will be organizing three identical webinars at different times to facilitate participation across time zones.

Cross Community Working Group (CWG) on Naming Related Functions Draft Transition Proposal

1 December 2014 | Following the request of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for ICANN "convene a multistakeholder process to develop a plan to transition the U.S. government stewardship role" with regard to the IANA Functions and related root zone management, a Cross Community Working Group (CWG) was tasked with developing to produce a consolidated transition proposal for the elements of the IANA Functions relating to the Domain Name System (DNS).

ICANN Finalizes Process for Requests for Release of Two-Character ASCII Labels

1 December 2014 | As previously announced, ICANN has been working towards developing a process to permit registries to request the release of two-character ASCII labels at the second-level for registration to 3rd parties and activation in the DNS pursuant to Section 2 of Specification 5. That process is now final and available.


Upcoming Events

8-12 February 2014: 52nd International Public ICANN Meeting – Singapore

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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."