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Global Addressing Policies


Title Comment Date Adopted
Board's Review Procedures for Global Internet Number Resource Policies Forwarded for Ratification by the ASO Address Council in Accordance with the ASO MoU This is not a Global Policy, but the procedure used by the Board to review proposed global policies. 15 July 2005


Policy Title Comment Date Adopted
Global Policy for Allocation of IPv6 Address Space This is the policy for allocating IPv6 blocks to RIRs 7 September 2006
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Policy for Allocation of ASN Blocks to Regional Internet Registries This is the policy for allocating Autonomous System Number blocks to RIRs September 2010
Global Policy for Post Exhaustion IPv4 Allocation Mechanisms by the IANA This policy defines the basis on which IANA will accept returns of IPv4 space to its reclamation pool and the basis on which it will allocate that space to the RIRs 6 May 2012

Obsoleted Policies

Policy Title Comment Date Obsoleted
Global Policy for Allocation of ASN Blocks to Regional Internet Registries This was the policy for allocating Autonomous System Number blocks to RIRs September 2010
Policy For Allocation of IPv4 Blocks to Regional Internet Registries This is the policy for allocating IPv4 blocks to RIRs 3 February 2011
Global Policy for the Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space The is the policy for allocating the last five IPv4 blocks to RIRs 3 February 2011
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."