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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 20 March 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Request for Proposal for LGR Tool Set

19 March 2015 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") is seeking a provider to design and develop software for creating, using and managing Label Generation Rulesets (LGRs) based on a new machine readable format based on the formal representation available at https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-davies-idntables.

CCWG-Accountability and CWG-Stewardship Prepare for Face-to-Face Meetings in Istanbul

19 March 2015 | The CCWG-Accountability and the CWG-Stewardship will each hold a face-to-face meeting in Istanbul, Turkey the week of 23-27 March 2015.

ICANN Draft FY16 Operating Plan & Budget

18 March 2015 | ICANN seeks and welcomes community input on all elements of the draft FY16 Annual Operating Plan & Budget.

ICANN Quarterly Stakeholder Report - Register for the Q3 Call on 23 April 2015

18 March 2015 | ICANN has announced its FY15 Q3 Stakeholder Call, which will take place on 23 April at 15:00 UTC.

Japanese Community Forms Generation Panel for Developing the Japanese Root Zone Label Generation Rules (LGR)

17 March 2015 | ICANN is pleased to announce that the Generation Panel for the Japanese Label Generation Rules (LGR) for the Root Zone has been seated.

Request for Proposal: DNS Study for the Middle East and Adjoining Countries

16 March 2015 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") is seeking a provider to conduct a study on the domain name industry in the Middle East and Adjoining Countries ("MEAC Region")1.

AFRICA Focus: WEBINAR on the ICANN Accreditation Process

16 March 2015 | We would like to invite you to join a Webinar on the ICANN Registrars Accreditation Process on Wednesday 18 March 2015 from 16:00 to 17:00 UTC.

Upcoming Events

21-25 June 2015: 53rd International Public ICANN Meeting – Buenos Aires

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY15 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."