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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 2 November 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Concludes 30th International Public Meeting

2 November 2007 | ICANN continued its work to strengthen the single, global, interoperable Internet at its just concluded 30th International Public Meeting in Los Angeles.

New Chairman of ICANN Elected Unanimously

2 November 2007 | Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand lawyer, has been elected unanimously as the new Chairman of the Board of ICANN.

Vint Cerf Releases 'Looking Towards the Future' Statement

2 November 2007 | Vint Cerf, the retiring chairman of the board with ICANN, today released "Looking Towards the Future," his Legacy Letter to the ICANN Community.

Comments Sought on Proposed Terms of Reference for Independent Review of the DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC)

2 November 2007 | ICANN is seeking public comments on proposed Terms of Reference, which detail questions that would guide the independent review of ICANN's DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC).

Video from Vint Cerf Tribute Released

1 November 2007 | ICANN posted the video tributes from Tuesday night's salute to retiring Board Chair Vint Cerf on its website.

ICANN Keeps Building Global Relationships With Frameworks

1 November 2007 | ICANN has signed four more exchanges of letters with country code top level domain operators – bring the total to seven signed at ICANN's 30th International Public Meeting in Los Angeles.

ICANN Community Thanks Vint Cerf for Extraordinary Efforts

31 October 2007 | The ICANN community came together to thank retiring chair Vint Cerf for his eight years of service on the board at a gala ceremony at the 30th International Public Meeting of ICANN.

ICANN Signs Historic 30th Framework at 30th International Meeting

29 October 2007 | ICANN has signed three exchanges of letters with country code top level domain operators — including the historic 30th one — at its 30th International Public Meeting in Los Angeles.

Workshop Explains New Generic Top Level Domains Framework

29 October 2007 | The nuts and bolts of the proposed policy for creating new gTLDs are being laid out today at a workshop at the 30th International Public Meeting of ICANN.

ICANN Opens Historic 30th International Public Meeting in L.A.

29 October 2007 | "It's fitting to host such an historic meeting in California. ICANN will be looking at issues impacting the future of the Internet in the place where, in many ways, the Internet was born and grew up," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO.

IDN Status Report

28 October 2007


ICANN in the News

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

Domain drain (Associated Press)

2 November 2007 | Vint Cerf steps down this week as chairman of ICANN.

Net protocol to unleash explosion (The Australian)

30 October 2007 | THE biggest technology upgrade to the internet in more than 20 years will be finalised this week, preparing the World Wide Web for an explosion of new growth.


ICANN at Work

ICANN staff member, Anne-Rachel Inne, attended the French Decision Makers training on Internet Governance and the Connect Africa Summit in Kigali, Rwanda between 24 and 30 October 2007. Anne-Rachel made presentations on the history of the Internet and the influence of its architecture on its governance, on GAC as an opportunity for Governments and challenges in managing ccTLDS.

ICANN is a sposnor of both events and the meetings details, including presentations and agendas are or will be available on the meetings web site at: http://www.uneca.org and http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/connect/africa/2007/summit/index.html.


Upcoming Events

4 - 6 November 2007 - WITSA's Global Public Policy Conference 2007 - Cairo, Egypt

7 - 9 November 2007 - eLAC 2007 - San Salvador, El Salvador

12 - 15 November 2007 - Internet Governance Forum 2007 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

12 - 15 November 2007 - UNESCO - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2 - 7 December 2007 - 70th IETF - Vancouver, Canada

3 - 6 December 2007 - ITU Telecom Europe 2007 - Sofia, Bulgaria

10 - 15 February 2008: 31th International Public ICANN Meeting - New Delhi, India


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."