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Public Comment - December 2010 archive

Proposed Changes to the ICANN Bylaws Article XI: Advisory Committees Relating to the Charter and Membership of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC)

(ended 2 December 10)
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ATRT Draft Proposed Recommendations

(ended 3 December 10)
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Accountability & Transparency Review – Community Feedback

(ended 4 December 10)
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Proposed Bylaws Amendment to Create a Non-Voting Chair-Elect to the Nominating Committee

(ended 10 December 10)
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Proposed Bylaws Amendments Changing Term Ending Dates for Supporting Organization and At-Large Selected Board Members

(ended 8 December 10 Extended to 8 January 11)
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JAS WG Milestone Report and Accompanying Addenda

(ended 15 December 10 Extended to 10 January 11)
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Draft Final Report on Policy Aspects Regarding Introduction of Single Character IDN TLDs

(ended 30 December 10 Extended to 12 January 11)
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Proposed Final New gTLD Applicant Guidebook

(ended 10 December 10 Extended to 15 January 11)

Review of IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process

(ended 17 December 10 Extended to 31 January 11)
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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."