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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 1 August 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Formalizes Relationship with ccTLD Manager for Thailand

1 August 2008 | ICANN has announced that it has signed an exchange of letters with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .th-Thailand, Thai network Information Center Foundation.

L'ICANN Lance la Policy Update en Français

30 July 2008 | ICANN lance aujourd'hui son programme de mise à jour gratuite des politiques, la Policy Update, en français, preuve supplémentaire de son engagement permanent pour une plus grande transparence organisationnelle à l'échelle mondiale et de sa volonté de mieux informer la communauté de ses activités d'élaboration de politiques.

ICANN Lanza la Policy Update en Español

30 July 2008 | ICANN lanza hoy la Policy Update en español gratuita para sus suscriptores como parte de su constante esfuerzo por incrementar la transparencia organizativa en el ámbito mundial y ofrecer mejor información a la comunidad sobre sus actividades de elaboración de políticas.

ICANN Seeks Expressions of Interest from Registrars to Receive Names from a De-Accredited Registrar

30 July 2008 | As the result of the de-accreditation of #1 Domain Names International, Inc. dba 1dni.com (IANA ID 101), ICANN is seeking Statements of Interest from ICANN-accredited registrars that are interested in assuming sponsorship of the gTLD names that had been managed by #1 Domain Names International, Inc. dba 1dni.com.

ICANN Publishes 2008 Semi-Annual Contractual Compliance Audit Report

30 July 2008 | ICANN's Contractual Compliance Department publishes its second semi-annual Registrar and Registry Contractual Compliance Audit Report. This report summarizes ICANN's audit activities from October 2007 through June 2008.

ICANN Opens Comment Forum on .COOP and .MOBI Proposed Contract Changes to Allocate Single-Character Names

28 July 2008 | ICANN opened a public comment forum on proposed amendments to Appendix 6 of the DotCoop and DotMobi Sponsored TLD Agreements.

Upcoming Events

2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt

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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."