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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 20 September 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Draft Final Report on Protection of IGO and INGO Identifiers in All gTLDs

20 September 2013 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization ("GNSO") Policy Development Process Working Group is tasked with addressing the issue of Protecting the identifiers of certain International Government Organizations ("IGOs") and International Non-Governmental Organizations ("INGOs") in all gTLDs and they have published its draft Final Report for public comment.

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN 49 in Singapore

20 September 2013 | The program seeks to identify members of the Internet community who either have not previously been able to participate in ICANN processes or constituent organizations, or those who require further exposure to the Internet community and its work but cannot travel and attend a meeting without financial support.

Update Regarding Call for Volunteers to Evaluate Metrics Related to Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice

17 September 2013 | ICANN is revising its previous call for volunteers and invites interested individuals to volunteer to serve on the Implementation Advisory Group for CCT by sending an email to iag-cct@icann.org by 15 October 2013.

Upcoming Events

17-21 November 2013: 48th 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."