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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 20 February 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Updates Authorization Process for Release of Two-Character ASCII Labels

20 February 2015 | Today, ICANN is announcing updates to the "Authorization Process for the Release of Two-Character ASCII Labels" to take into account additional direction from the ICANN Board. On 12 February 2015, the Board took action to accept advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) on this subject issued in the GAC's 11 February 2015 Communiqué – Singapore [PDF, 113 KB], and directed the President and CEO, or his designee, to proceed immediately to implement the following changes to the process:

Closing Date Approaching: Nomination Period For 2015 ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award | Award Presentation Planned for ICANN 53 | Nominations Close 02 March 2015

19 February 2015 | On 10 December 2015 ICANN announced the opening of the nomination period for ICANN's 2015 Multistakeholder Ethos Award Program. The nomination period will close on 2 March 2015. This award program seeks to recognize long-standing community members who have served in leadership roles in multiple ICANN working groups or committees and demonstrated collaboration with different supporting organizations and/or advisory committees.

Second Middle East DNS Forum to Take Place in Amman Jordan

16 February 2015 | This is the second edition of the Middle East DNS Forum (ME DNS), which aims to build on the inaugural forum that took place in Dubai, early 2014.

Upcoming Events

21-25 June 2015: 53rd 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."