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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 7 November 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Formalizes Relationship with ccTLD Manager for Egypt (.eg)

7 November 2008 | ICANN has announced that it has signed an exchange of letters with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .eg, EUN, .eg Registry Sector.

ICANN Concludes Successful 33rd Meeting in Cairo

7 November 2008 | During the meeting, key issues that will influence the future development of the Internet were discussed by more than 1,000 delegates from 144 countries, including the introduction of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

ICANN's 33rd International Meeting Arrives In Cairo

3 November 2008 | Further progress towards the implementation of new generic Top Level Domains and the global expansion of the domain name system is expected this week, as ICANN opens its 33rd International meeting in Cairo.

Independent Reviewer's Report on the ICANN Board

2 November 2008 | ICANN's Board has been provided with the Boston Consulting Group/Colin Carter & Associates' independent review of the Board.

More Mechanisms for Transparency and Accountability

2 November 2008 | In recent years, ICANN has taken many steps to improve transparency and accountability in its operations. Most notably, a detailed budget process and disclosure process has been developed.

ICANN Cairo: Working Session on Single-Character Names Added to Schedule

2 November 2008 | ICANN added an open Working Session on Single-Character Second-Level Domain Names to the schedule for Wednesday 5 November 2008.

Fast Track Receives Over 50 Responses

1 November 2008 | Following the recommendation from the IDNC WG Final report, ICANN sent letters to all countries and territories requesting information about their interest in participating in the Fast Track process.

Upcoming Events

1 - 6 March 2009: 34rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Mexico City, Mexico

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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."