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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 30 August 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Announces Conclusion of New gTLD Initial Evaluations [PDF, 211 KB]

30 August 2013 | Los Angeles, California… ICANN’s Generic Domains Division announced today the conclusion of the Initial Evaluation (IE) phase of the new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) program. More than 1,700 applications have now moved to the next steps in the program.

New gTLD Dotless Domain Names Prohibited

30 August 2013 | At its meeting on 13 August 2013, the ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) adopted a resolution affirming that "dotless domain names" are prohibited.

Webinar: Digital Engagement Project

29 August 2013 | Please join us for a webinar on Wednesday, 4 September 2013 at 14:00 – 15:00 UTC during which we will update the community on the project background and status.

Internet Governance Expert to Advise ICANN on Global Strategy [PDF, 266 KB]

28 August 2013 | Los Angeles, California… Theresa Swinehart, a leading expert on international Internet governance and policy and a major force in ICANN’s historical evolution, has been named Senior Advisor to the President on Global Strategy.

Adopted FY14 Operating Plan and Budget

27 August 2013 | On 22 August 2013, the ICANN Board approved the FY14 Operating Plan and Budget. This document describes the planned core operations and project activities, aligned with the required funding, for the 2014 fiscal year.

Upcoming Events

17-21 November 2013: 48th International Public ICANN Meeting - Buenos Aires

About ICANN

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Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 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."