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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 February 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

CWG-Stewardship Chairs' Statement - Summary of ICANN 52 Meeting | Lise Fuhr & Jonathan Robinson

12 February 2015 | The Cross Community Working Group (CWG) on Naming Related Functions held two sessions at the ICANN 52 Meeting in Singapore (8-12 February 2015): a two-hour working session on Wednesday, and a questions and answers session on Thursday.

ICANN 52 Board Statement on ICANN Sending IANA Stewardship Transition and Enhancing ICANN Accountability Proposals to NTIA

12 February 2015 | We have received several questions requesting clarification as to how ICANN will handle receipt of the proposal from the ICG and the Work Stream 1 proposal from the CCWG. We hope the following will be helpful.

ICANN and APTLD Signs Memorandum of Understanding to Promote Regional Collaboration

12 February 2015 | Singapore… ICANN and the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain (APTLD) today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to forge an alliance to foster and promote regional collaboration.

IAB Liaison to the Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC)

12 February 2015 | The Internet Architecture Board and the Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) issued a joint statement confirming their ongoing liaison relationship.

ICANN 52 Singapore GAC Communiqué

12 February 2015 | The Governmental Advisory Committee meeting at ICANN 52 in Singapore has issued its Singapore Communiqué.

ICANN Signs MOU with EURid to Develop Local Expertise in the Domain Names System (DNS) Sector in Africa and the Middle East

10 February 2015 | Singapore, 9 February, 2015 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) signed today with the European Registry for Internet Domains (EURid), manager of the .eu TLD, a Memorandum of Understanding for the purpose of collaborating together on developing local expertise in DNS technical, policy, and business areas in Africa and the Middle East.

IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group Responds to Submitted Proposals

10 February 2015 | As part of its assessment of the proposals received concerning protocol parameters and numbers, the ICG has sent the following question to the IETF IANAPLAN working group and CRISP team: https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2015-02-09-en#icgresponse

Global Tech Leaders Reaffirm Commitment to Multistakeholder Model of Internet Governance

9 February 2015 | Singapore…Singapore's Minister of Communications and Information, Dr. Yaacob bin Ibrahim, and former Senior Advisor to President Bill Clinton, Ira Magaziner, spoke to the success of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance during the Opening Ceremony of ICANN's 52nd public meeting today.

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21-25 June 2015: 53rd International Public ICANN Meeting – Buenos Aires

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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."