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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 12 December 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Launch of the Implementation Advisory Group to Review Existing ICANN Procedure for Handling WHOIS Conflicts with Privacy Law

12 December 2014 | We are pleased to announce the launch of the Implementation Advisory Group to Review the Existing ICANN Procedure for Handling WHOIS Conflicts with Privacy Law (IAG-WHOIS Conflicts). Sixty-one (61) individuals responded to the Call for Volunteers.

Release of Country and Territory Names within the .BMW and .MINI TLDs

11 December 2014 | A Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) request was submitted by Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft to allow the release of country and territory names for .BMW and .MINI top-level domains (TLDs).

Nomination Period Opens For 2015 ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award | Award Presentation Planned for ICANN 53 | Nominations Close 02 March 2015

10 December 2014 | ICANN is pleased to announce the opening of the nomination period for ICANN's 2015 Multistakeholder Ethos Award Program. This award program seeks to recognize long-standing community members who have served in leadership roles in multiple ICANN working groups or committees and demonstrated collaboration with different supporting organizations and/or advisory committees.

Proposed Renewal of .JOBS Sponsored TLD Registry Agreement

9 December 2014 | ICANN is posting for public comment the proposed agreement for renewal of the 2005 Registry Agreement for .JOBS which is set to expire on 5 May 2015.

RSSAC Approves Advisories on Service Expectations of Root Servers and Measurements of the Root Server System

9 December 2014 | At its regular meeting on 20 November 2014, the RSSAC approved RSSAC001 and RSSAC002, the first two formal advisories produced by the RSSAC under its reorganized structure.

Apply Now for ICANN Leadership Positions

8 December 2014 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) Nominating Committee (NomCom) invites interested individuals to submit applications and/or to recommend candidates for ICANN's key leadership positions.

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."