Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 30 March 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Concludes Busy 28th Public Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal

30 March 2007 | "We've just finished one of ICANN's busiest and issue-intensive meetings and it helped ICANN make substantial progress on numerous fronts," said Dr Vint Cerf, Chairman of ICANN ...

ICANN European At-Large Community MoU with ICANN Open for Public Comment

30 March 2007 | The European region of At-Large has reached a consensus on the contents of a Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") between the region and ICANN ...

ICANN Seeks Public Comments on Proposed Terms of Reference for Independent Review of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)

30 March 2007 | ICANN is seeking public comments on proposed Terms of Reference, which detail questions that would guide the independent review of ICANN's At-Large Advisory Committee ...

Board Rejects .XXX Domain Application

30 March 2007 | The Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today voted to reject the .XXX sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD) application from ICM Registry, Inc ...

Independent Review of ICANN's Accountability and Transparency

29 March 2007 | As one of a number of initiatives aimed at further improvements in accountability and transparency, ICANN engaged One World Trust to undertake an independent review of standards of accountability and transparency within ICANN. ...

Thousands of Voices Get Direct Say At ICANN

29 March 2007 | Internet users from three of ICANN's five global regions will now have direct input to the organization thanks to the creation of three Regional At-Large Organisations (RALOs) ...

How To Interact With The ICANN Public Forum in Lisbon, Portugal

29 March 2007 | ICANN has changed the method by which it draws input into its public meetings — including the public forum — in an effort to make it easier to interact, and hence encourage greater interaction ...

ICANN Formalizes Relationships with ccTLD Managers for Côte d'Ivoire and Russia

28 March 2007 | ICANN announced today that it has formalized its 20th and 21st relationships with country code top level domain (ccTLD) managers .ci - Côte d'Ivoire (Institut National Polytechnique Felix Houphouet Boigny), and .ru - Russia (Coordination Center for TLD RU), respectively ...

Pre-Registration Now Open for ICANN's 25-29 June 2007 Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico

27 March 2007 | ICANNs next meeting will be held 2529 June 2007 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The meeting is free to attend, and open to any interested person ...

ICANN Introduces New Website

26 March 2007 | ICANN today introduces a new website with better navigation and new features. "ICANN is committed to being more transparent and accessible" said Paul Levins, ICANN's Executive Officer and Vice President, Corporate Affairs. "Reform of our website is a key part of that commitment."

French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese Versions of Key Documents Under Discussion in Lisbon

26 March 2007 | A master listing of the substantive documents under discussion by the At-Large Community during the Lisbon meetings ...

Factsheet - RegisterFly and Registrars [PDF, 580 KB]

26 March 2007 | This factsheet will explain why and how the RegisterFly problem arose, give an explanation of the current system, and discuss possible solutions to prevent a similar failure from happening again. ...

ICANN's 28th International Meeting Opens in Lisbon, Portugal

26 March 2007 | ICANN's 28th International meeting opened today in Lisbon, Portugal. It will see important developments in the organization's mission of global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers ...

Upcoming Events

28 April 2007 — AFTLD Annual General Meeting at AfriNIC in Abuja, Nigeria

25 – 29 June 2007 — ICANN Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico

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

Proposed Budget Fiscal Year 2006 – 2007 [PDF, 180 KB]

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please visit http://www.icann.org/communications/#newsletter

If you have questions or comments about this mailing list, send an email to ICANN-Newsletter@icann.org

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."