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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 25 April 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Opens Comment Period on PIR's Proposed Implementation of DNSSEC

23 April 2008 | ICANN is opening a comment period on Public Interest Registry's proposed implementation of DNS Security Extensions in .ORG.

Request for Proposals (RFP) for an Independent Evaluator for the ICANN Board of Directors

21 April 2008 | ICANN is seeking to appoint an independent evaluator to undertake a review of the ICANN Board.


ICANN in the News

These links lead to external news stories. ICANN is not responsible for the content of these pages.

Securing the Internet's DNS (Dark Reading)

24 April 2008 | The Internet is slowly inching closer to ratcheting up the security of its Domain Name System server architecture: ICANN plans to go operational with the secure DNS technology, DNSSEC, later this year in one of its domains.

Despite guidelines, assigning Net domain names is tricky (The Age)

18 April 2008 | About 250 country-code domain names exist for various nations or territories around the world, used as suffixes in the Internet addresses crucial for computers to find Web sites and route e-mail. Outside the United States, these suffixes are often preferred over the global ".com" as a source of national pride. But deciding who gets to have one or keep one can be tricky.


Upcoming Events

12 - 15 May 2008 - ITU Africa Telecom - Cairo, Egypt

20 June 2008 - EGENI Europe 2008 - Paris, France

22 - 27 June 2008: 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Paris, France


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

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008

Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2007 - 2008 [PDF, 426 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."