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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 March 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICG Announces New Web Site and Mailing List

12 March 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has announced its new independent website www.ianacg.org.

IDN ccTLD Request from Macao Successfully Passes String Evaluation

10 March 2015 | ICANN is pleased to announce the successful evaluation of the proposed IDN ccTLD string for Macao.

Reference Label Generation Rulesets (LGRs) for the Second Level

10 March 2015 | During the new gTLD program's Pre-Delegation Testing (PDT), ICANN has noted a large number of IDN table submissions. The IDN tables submitted by the new gTLD registries varied in the repertoire of characters, variant and contextual rules, and format. On the request of the community, to facilitate and improve consistency of testing and stability of registry operations of new gTLDs, ICANN intends to develop reference IDN tables in machine readable format, called Label Generation Rulesets (LGRs) for the second level, for use in PDT and the Registry Service Evaluation Process (RSEP). ICANN is suggesting a process to ensure both linguistic and technical expert input and community review of these tables being developed. The community is requested to review and provide feedback on the effectiveness of the suggested process for the development of these tables, and propose any further improvements.

Internationalized Registration Data Expert Working Group Draft Final Report Public Comment Opened

9 March 2015 | This Public Forum invites comments on the draft final report from Whois review team internationalized registration data expert working group. The Report proposes internationalization requirements for twelve categories of data elements currently outputted by the various gTLD registration data directory services.

Upcoming Events

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."