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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 July 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

— No announcements this week —

ICANN in the News

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

Time To Let A Thousand Domains Bloom? (BBC News)

3 July 2007 | Tight control over domain names will damage the internet, says Bill Thompson.

ICANN's Next Challenge: Find A New Leader (PC World)

1 July 2007 | Internet visionary Vint Cerf will retire after years of guiding Internet oversight policies.

ICANN Featured Individual: Jason Keenan, Media Adviser

Jason brings 15 years experience in media relations, writing, editing, and graphic design. Immediately before joining ICANN he was the Senior Writer and Legislative Support Officer with the Premier of British Columbia. He also worked in issues management, and communications with the Government of B.C. and a Canadian Member of Parliament.

Prior to this public service career, Jason was a reporter, columnist, and editor at newspapers in British Columbia and Alberta in Western Canada where he won various provincial, national, and international awards for his work. One of those publications -- the Rossland Summit -- was the first on-line newspaper in British Columbia in the early 1990s.

Jason has a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Manitoba and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London.

Upcoming Events

22-27 July 2007 - 69th IETF - Chicago, IL, USA

26-27 July 2007 - Asian ICANN Registrar and Registry Gathering - Hong Kong, China

29 August - 7 September 2007 - APNIC 24 - New Delhi, India

29 August - 7 September 2007 - SANOG 10 - New Delhi, India

23 - 28 September 2007 - AfriNIC 7 - Durban, South Africa

17-19 October 2007 - ARIN XX - Albuquerque, NM, USA

22-26 October 2007 - RIPE 55 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

29 October - 2 November 2007: 30th International Public ICANN Meeting - Los Angeles, CA

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."