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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 29 December 2006

A weekly electronic newsletter from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

— No announcements this week —


ICANN in the News

Listed below are media mentions involving ICANN over the course of the last week:

Selecting a Domain Name (Techworld)

27 December 2006

Mobiles Still Ringing in New Year (BBC News)

23 December 2006

The Closing Window: A Historical Analysis of Domain Tasting (CircleID)

20 December 2006


ICANN Featured Individual: David L. Wodelet, Board Member

Dave Wodelet is the Director of IP Network Engineering for Shaw Communications, a diversified Canadian communications company providing broadband cable television, high-speed Internet, digital phone, satellite direct-to-home and telecommunications services throughout Canada and the U.S.

Wodelet has over 27 years of experience in the industry, holds bachelor and master degrees in diverse fields such as computing, education and genetics, and has published papers on computerized management systems and genetic insect control. He has taught at both the public and university levels and is frequently asked to give talks and keynote presentations throughout the industry to audiences ranging from a few hundred to web-casts viewed by thousands worldwide. He has presented for such notable organizations as Cisco, PAIX, Equinix, NANOG, ARIN, ISPCON, OFC/NFOEC, Big Pipe, Switch & Data, the Global Peering Forum and the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission).

Wodelet is a pioneer in his field. He was the first in Alberta to build a wide area educational network and the first to extend the Internet into the educational school system. He was also the first in Canada to do broadband data-over-cable trails with Shaw and went on to create their first broadband Internet service offering. He was the first in Canada to deploy a national high-speed 10 Gigabyte Internet backbone and the first of the North American MSOs to extend peering into Europe.

A founding member of ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers), he has played a central role in the development of many of the early ARIN policies pertaining to MSOs and broadband allocations. He served as the cable MSO representative for many years. As an active ARIN member and supporter, he sponsored a number of ARIN meetings and hosted ARIN's first international meeting outside the USA.

He is a strong supporter and advocate of open Internet and industry standards. His work on obtaining vendor support for open GBIC/SFP standards has resulted in enhanced equipment interoperability as well as billions in savings worldwide for the telecommunications industry.

Wodelet was appointed to the ICANN Board by the Address Supporting Organization in May 2006. His three-year term will end six months after the conclusion of ICANN's annual meeting in 2009.


ICANN At Work

During the past week, ICANN staff have provided input to the Internet community at events such as:

  • No events this week.

Major Upcoming Events

26 – 30 March 2007: ICANN Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal


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 [PDF, 72 KB]

July 2007 – June 2010

Operating Plan (Draft)

Fiscal Year 2006 – 07

Proposed Budget [PDF, 180 KB]

Fiscal Year 2006 – 2007

26 – 30 March 2007 — ICANN Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal


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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."