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The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process was launched on 16 November 2009 (00:00UTC):

The ICANN meeting in Korea (26-30 October 2009) was a milestone in IDN TLD development. The ICANN Board approved the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process. The resolution of the Board approval is available here, and the transcript from the ICANN Board meeting is available here. A detailed presentation of the requirements in the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process can be found here.

The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process enables countries and territories that use languages based on scripts other than Latin to offer their users domain names in non-Latin characters. These IDN ccTLDs are available only to the governments and administrations of countries and territories listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard, or their designated representatives or operators. There is a number of string requirements for IDN ccTLDs to be delegated through the process, one of which is demonstration that the IDN ccTLD constitute a meaningful representation of the corresponding country or territory name.

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IDN ccTLD Fast Track Video and Presentations

During the ICANN meeting in Korea, ICANN staff held a workshop where the functionality of the entire process was explained. The presentation slides and webcast can be found here: IDN ccTLD Fast Track Workshop & Presentation.

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."