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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 August 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Have Questions About the ICANN Accountability Process?

22 August 2014 | On 14 August ICANN posted the Enhancing ICANN Accountability and Governance: Process and Next Steps. Since posting, we've received some questions that are compiled here together with items perhaps useful to be addressed for the community.

APAC Webinar: ICANN Participation in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

21 August 2014 | The webinar will provide a brief overview of the ICANN related sessions at the IGF in Istanbul from 1-5 September, and will provide an opportunity for members of the community to discuss collaboration opportunities.

Reminder: Next Meeting of ICG to follow IGF in Istanbul

21 August 2014 | The next face-to-face meeting of the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) will take place on 6 September 2014 following the Ninth Annual IGF Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.

Public Comment Invited: Board Working Group Report on Nominating Committee (BWG-NomCom)

21 August 2014 | The ICANN Board has directed that the report prepared by the Board Working Group on Nominating Committee (BWG-NomCom) relating to issues of size and composition be posted for public comment.

Introduction of Two-Character Domain Names for .SOHU, .IMMO, .SAARLAND, .CLUB

19 August 2014 | Four (4) Registry Services Evaluation Process (RSEP) requests were submitted by the registry operators listed below to allow the introduction of two-character domain names for the below TLDs. In total, the requests concern 4 New gTLDs.

Accountability & Governance Public Experts Group Members Announced

19 August 2014 | As described in the 14 August 2014 posting of the Enhancing ICANN Accountability: Process and Next Steps, four respected individuals with backgrounds in academia, governmental relations, global insight, and the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC), will form the Accountability & Governance Public Experts Group.

Webinar: ICANN Participation in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

18 August 2014 | You are invited to participate in an informal webinar about ICANN's participation in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) on Friday, 22 August at 16:00 UTC.

Upcoming Events

12-16 October 2014: 51st International Public ICANN Meeting – Los Angeles

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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."