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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 1 May 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICG Announces Update Regarding Community Comments and the ICG Forum

1 May 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) today announced that it has published its process for handling comments submitted to the ICG Forum

Board Approves ICANN Five-Year Operating Plan (FY16-FY20)

1 May 2015 | On the 26 April 2015, the Board met in Los Angles, California, and approved the ICANN Five-Year Operating Plan (FY16-FY20)

New gTLD Applicant and GDD Portal Update

30 April 2015 | 30 April 2015 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that the first phase of its investigation into a data exposure issue in the New gTLD Applicant and GDD (Global Domains Division) portals has concluded. These portals contain information from applicants to ICANN's New gTLD Program and new gTLD registry operators. No other systems were affected.

WEBINAR: Further Discussion on the CWG-Stewardship 2nd Draft Proposal for Public Comment

28 April 2015 | The Cross Community Working Group to Develop an IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal for Naming Related Functions (CWG-Stewardship) released its 2nd draft proposal for public comment on 22 April. Following the opening of the public comment proceeding, the CWG-Stewardship Chairs hosted two briefing webinars on 24 April.

Guidelines for Designing Script-Specific Label Generation Rules (LGR) for the Root Zone

27 April 2015 | ICANN is releasing a set of documents that present an overview of the tasks of a Generation Panel as well as additional orientation and guidance.

Maximal Starting Repertoire Version 2 (MSR-2) for the Development of Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone

27 April 2015 | To support IDN labels in the root zone, the ICANN community, at the direction of the Board, undertook several projects to study and make recommendations on their viability and delegation. In the context of the implementation of the procedure, ICANN is pleased to announce that the Integration Panel has released the second version of the Maximal Starting Repertoire (MSR-2).

ICANN Announces Effective Dates for Additional Whois Information Policy and Whois Advisory

27 April 2015 | 27 April 2015 – ICANN today announced that the effective date of the Additional Whois Information Policy (AWIP) and Whois advisory is 31 January 2016. In addition, ICANN has published an updated Whois advisory based on input from the community.

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."