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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 15 May 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

2013 RAA Whois Accuracy Program Specification Review

14 May 2015 | The purpose of this initiative is to review the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement's Whois Accuracy Program Specification.

Release of Country and Territory Names within the .SONY, .ARCHI, .BIO and .SAARLAND TLDs

13 May 2015 | Four (4) Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) requests were submitted by the registry operators listed below to allow the release of country and territory names for the below TLDs.

ICG Announces Sixteenth Conference Call and Publishes a Statement

12 May 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has scheduled its sixteenth conference call:

Proposed Renewal of .TRAVEL Sponsored TLD Registry Agreement

12 May 2015 | This public comment proceeding seeks input on the proposed agreement for renewal of the 2005 Registry Agreement for .TRAVEL which is set to expire on 21 July 2015. This proposal is a result of discussions between ICANN and Tralliance Registry Management Company, LLC (the Registry Operator for the .TRAVEL TLD).


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."