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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 June 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Opens Public Comment Period for Draft/Interim Terminated Registrar Transition Procedure

6 June 2008 | In consultation with the community, ICANN has developed this draft/interim procedure for managing transition of gTLD domain name registrations from a de-accredited registrar to an accredited gaining registrar.

ICANN Seeks Expressions of Interest from Registrars to Receive Names from Two De-Accredited Registrars

6 June 2008 | ICANN Seeks Expressions of Interest from Registrars to Receive Bulk Transfer of Names from De-Accredited Registrars Best Registration Services, Inc. dba Bestregistrar.com and DotForce Corp. dba DotForce.com.

RSTEP Report on PIR's Request to Implement DNSSEC in .ORG

5 June 2008 | The RSTEP Review Team completed its report that can be found at http://icann.org/registries/rsep/rstep-report-pir-dnssec-04jun08.pdf [PDF, 481 KB].

Internationalized Domain Name Program Adds Two Languages

5 June 2008 | This draft FY09 Operating Plan and Budget is being posted for community review with the support of the Board Finance Committee.

ICANN Posts Draft Community Travel Support Document

3 June 2008 | At the February Delhi meeting, there was a public consultation regarding ICANN's approach to travel support funding for the community. After the public consultation in Delhi, a public comment period was held, and the feedback was analyzed and noted on-line.

ICANN in the News

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

ICANN Makes Urdu Available (Netxpress Online)

6 June 2008 | "As of today, June 5, 2008," writes Khalil Ahmad, CEO & Chairman PakNIC Limited, "we are proud to let you know that ICANN has officially announced the availability of URDU on the ICANN wikipages setup for global testing of IDNs today."

UNESCO encourages Governments to participate in the next meeting of ICANN (UNESCO.ORG)

6 June 2008 | UNESCO encourages Governments to participate in the next meeting of the Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN to be held in Paris from 22 to 26 June 2008.

Upcoming Events

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

Proposed FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 476 KB]

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."