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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 30 November 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Trademark Clearinghouse "Strawman Solution"

30 November 2012 | Out of the recent Clearinghouse implementation discussions, a strawman solution has been produced to balance and address the concerns of affected stakeholders. This strawman solution is being posted for public comment.

Vice Presidents for Stakeholder Engagement Announced as Part of ICANN's Global Expansion

28 November 2012 | 28 November 2012... ICANN's Head of Global Stakeholder Engagement, Sally Costerton, has announced the appointment of four vice presidents whose mission is to improve the international presence and participation in the organization's multi-stakeholder model.

ICANN Board Forecasts New gTLD Protections for Intergovernmental and Non-governmental Organizations [PDF, 201 KB]

28 November 2012 | Los Angeles, California... The ICANN Board's New gTLD Program Committee has approved two resolutions with the goal of providing interim Domain Name protections to certain non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs).

Chehadé, Crocker Accept ITU Invitations to WCIT Opening Ceremony in Dubai

28 November 2012 | Fadi Chehadé, President of ICANN, and Steve Crocker, ICANN Board Chair, have accepted invitations from International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Secretary General Dr. Hamadoun Toure as his special guests to attend the opening ceremony of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai from 3 December 2012.

Consultation on the IANA Customer Service Complaint Resolution Process

27 November 2012 | A consultation on establishing and implementing a Customer Service Complaint Resolution Process for the 2012 IANA functions contract.

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7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

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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."