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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 24 October 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

The Internet Today and Tomorrow

23 October 2014 | A daylong event to discuss how Internet Governance shapes the way the Internet works and how we use it.

ICANN CEO Congratulates Newly Elected ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao

23 October 2014 | Fadi Chehadé, The President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has extended his congratulations and best wishes to the newly elected Secretary-General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Results Available for 22 October 2014 New gTLD Auction

22 October 2014 | On 22 October 2014, an Auction conducted by ICANN's authorized Auction service provider, Power Auctions LLC, was held to resolve string contention sets for three new generic Top-level Domain (gTLD) strings; SALON, SPOT, and REALTY.

Extended: Public Comment period for Board Working Group Report on Nominating Committee (BWG-NomCom)

21 October 2014 | The Public Comment period for Board Working Group Report on Nominating Committee (BWG-NomCom) has been extended. In view of the significant interest displayed by the community in this report at ICANN51, and in view of the importance of the topic for the future governance of ICANN, the comment period has been extended to 30 November 2014 and the reply period to 9 January 2015.

Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part D Policy Development Process (PDP) Recommendations for ICANN Board Consideration

20 October 2014 | Obtain community input on the 18 recommendations of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Development Process (PDP) on changes to the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) Part D, prior to consideration for adoption by the ICANN Board.

Upcoming Events

8-12 February 2015: 52nd International Public ICANN Meeting – Marrakech

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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."