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Contractual Compliance Blogs

.TOP Registry Has Cured the Notice of Breach of its Registry Agreement

How ICANN Registration Data Disclosure Requirements May Apply to RDRS Requests

ICANN Launches Reports on the Enforcement of DNS Abuse Requirements

ICANN's Enforcement of DNS Abuse Requirements: A Look at the First Two Months

ICANN Continues Support for Registrants Impacted by Epik Inc.

ICANN Support for Registrants Impacted by Epik Inc.

ICANN Contractual Compliance Report on the Enforcement of the ERRP and EDDP

2022 April New gTLD ICANN Contractual Compliance Audit

New ICANN Reporting Enhances Visibility of Complaint Volumes and Trends

ICANN Organization Enforcement of Registration Data Accuracy Obligations Before and After GDPR

June 2021 Enforcement of Registration Data Accuracy Obligations Before and After GDPR

ICANN Issues Breach Notice to Net 4 India Limited; Continues Support for Registrants

ICANN Support for Registrants and Those Impacted by Net 4 India Limited

Contractual Compliance: Addressing Domain Name System (DNS) Infrastructure Abuse

Enforcing the Temporary Specification

Enhancing Transparency in Contractual Compliance Reporting

Enhancing Transparency in Contractual Compliance Reporting

Following up on a Contractual Compliance & Consumer Safeguards Conversation

Improving Contractual Compliance

Six Weeks in Contractual Compliance and Consumer Safeguards

Update On Steps To Combat Abuse And Illegal Activity

ICANN Is Not the Internet Content Police

Beyond the Contract: Partnering to Strengthen Business and Consumer Protections

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."