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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 June 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Appoints Senior Director Contractual Compliance Asia/Pacific

19 June 2009 | ICANN is pleased to announce the appointment of Pamela Little (??? – pronounced "Lew Su-Ching") to the position of Senior Director Contractual Compliance Asia/Pacific.

Public Comment: Dot-pro Fee Amendment

17 June 2009 | The amendment would result in a fixed annual fee plus a transactional fee once the registry exceeds 50,000 domain registrations. If approved by the ICANN Board, the amendment would change the amount of fees paid by RegistryPro to ICANN.

Expressions of Interest Sought for Bulk Transfer of Registrations

15 June 2009 | As the result of the recent de-accreditation of registrar Maxim Internet, Inc., ICANN is seeking expressions of interest from ICANN-accredited registrars that might wish to assume sponsorship of the gTLD names that were previously managed by Maxim Internet.

Update on the Search and Appointment of a New President and CEO of ICANN

14 June 2009 | The Board expects to be in a position to approve the selection of the new CEO at the Board Meeting on 26 June 2009, during the ICANN Sydney Meeting.


Upcoming Events

21 - 26 June 2009: 35th International Public ICANN Meeting - Sydney, Australia


About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 KB]


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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."