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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 May 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Call for Expressions of Interest for 2015 Nominating Committee Chair and Chair-Elect

9 May 2014 | ICANN is seeking expressions of interest for leadership roles in the 2015 Nominating Committee (NomCom) – that of the 2015 NomCom Chair and Chair-Elect.

FY15 Operating Plan & Budget

8 May 2014 | Join us in creating ICANN's annual operating plan and budget for FY15, which describes planned activities for the year ahead (from 1 July 2014 – 30 June 2015).

New gTLD Auctions Updates – First Auction Confirmed

8 May 2014 | ICANN has updated the Auction Schedule for New gTLD applicants with strings in contention sets. The schedule now lists the participants confirmed for the first Auction on 4 June 2014, and the rescheduling of some sets based on requested postponements.

Notice of Potential Grant of Registrar Data Retention Waiver Request

7 May 2014 | Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd. ("Blacknight") submitted a data retention waiver request under the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (the "2013 RAA") on the basis of its contention that compliance with the data collection and/or retention requirements of the Specification violates applicable law.

Enhancing ICANN Accountability

6 May 2014 | As announced at ICANN's March 2014 Public Meeting in Singapore, ICANN is initiating a discussion on Enhancing ICANN Accountability. This discussion will look at how ICANN remains accountable in the absence of its historical contractual relationship to the U.S. Government and the perceived backstop with regard to ICANN's organization-wide accountability provided by that role.


Upcoming Events

22-26 June 2014: 50th International Public ICANN Meeting – London

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY14 Operating Plan and Budget

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."