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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 10 April 2015

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Grants Data Retention Waiver to NordNet SA

10 April 2015 | NordNet SA ("Registrar") submitted to ICANN a Registrar Data Retention Waiver Request ("Waiver Request") pursuant to Section 3 of the Data Retention Specification of the 2013 RAA.

Request for Quotation | Equipment Refresh RFQ

10 April 2015 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") is seeking one or more providers to facilitate the sourcing and pre-configuration tasks for servers and network equipment for our global network infrastructure.

WSIS Project Prizes 2015 Nomination

7 April 2015 | Two ICANN projects, the DNS Entrepreneurship Center and Investigating DNS Abuse/Misuse for Public Safety Community have been nominated for the Online Voting Phase of the WSIS Project Prizes 2015 contest.

ICG Announces Fourteenth and Fifteenth Conference Calls

6 April 2015 | The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has scheduled its fourteenth and fifteenth conference calls.

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."