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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 12 June 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Second Latin American and Caribbean DNS Forum Will Take Place in Buenos Aires, Argentina

11 June 2015 | The second edition of the LAC DNS Forum is a gathering place for industry, Internet policy and technical players. It will take place on 19 June in Buenos Aires and continues with the proposal originated in 2013 to promote a regional space for debate on DNS-related issues.

ICG – Fifth Face-to-Face Meeting and Working Session at ICANN 53 Buenos Aires

11 June 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) will be holding its next face-to-face meeting on Thursday 18 June and Friday 19 June from 09:00 – 17:00 in Buenos Aires.

Board Approves Singapore Hub Expansion

10 June 2015 | As part of its globalization strategy, ICANN established an Asia Pacific Hub in Singapore in August 2013, to better serve its regional stakeholders.

The Third Africa DNS Forum to Take Place in Nairobi, Kenya

8 June 2015 | This is the third Africa DNS forum following on the successful forums in Durban, South Africa (2013), and Abuja, Nigeria (2014).

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."