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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 3 July 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

EXTENDED: Proposed Schedule and Process/Operational Improvements for AoC and Organization Reviews

2 July 2015 | The Public Comment period for the Proposed Schedule and Process/Operational Improvements for AoC and Organizational Reviews has been extended.

Indonesia's PANDI Contributes to Responsive and Resilient Internet with First L-Root Instance in Indonesia

1 July 2015 | Jakarta, Indonesia … The first L-Root instance in Indonesia has been successfully installed in Jakarta, increasing the Domain Name System's (DNS) overall fault tolerance and its resilience against certain types of cyber threats, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Call for Expressions of Interest for 2016 | Nominating Committee Chair and Chair-Elect

1 July 2015 | ICANN is seeking expressions of interest for leadership roles in the 2016 Nominating Committee (NomCom) - that of the 2016 NomCom Chair and Chair-Elect.

GNSO Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information Policy Development Process (PDP) Recommendations for Board Consideration

29 June 2015 | This public comment proceeding seeks to obtain community input on the seven recommendations of the Generic Names Supporting Organization's Policy Development Process on Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information.

ICG Announces Upcoming Meetings

29 June 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has scheduled its twentieth to twenty-sixth calls.

Upcoming Events

18-22 October 2015: 54th International Public ICANN Meeting – Dublin

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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."