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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 8 February 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN 31st International Public Meeting in New Delhi Next Week

7 February 2008 | ICANN will open its 31st International Public Meeting on 11 February 2008 in New Delhi, India, a country and a region certain to be a the forefront of the waves of changes coming to the Internet.

Public Comments Requested on DNS Stability: The Effect of New gTLDs on the Internet Domain Name System

6 February 2008 | The ICANN community has recently completed a policy development process regarding the introduction of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN is seeking feedback on the proposed approach as a step in its implementation planning for the introduction of new gTLDs.

ICANN Posts Initial Operating Plan and Budget Framework for Fiscal Year 2009

4 February 2008 | The Initial Operating Plan and Budget Framework [PDF, 904 KB] kicks off the operational planning process for ICANN, providing the community with a first look at planned work and costs for fiscal year 2009.

IPv6 Address Added for Root Servers in the Root Zone

4 February 2008 | ICANN took another step along the path of deployment for the next-generation IPv6 Internet addressing system.


ICANN in the News

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

Government to push for Indian language IDNs at ICANN Meeting (Merinews)

8 February 2008 | With Internet growing at a rocketing speed in India and the country at the forefront of technology change, ICANN, the body charged with overseeing Internet address system is holding its international public meeting in New Delhi.

ICANN turns on IPv6 addresses (ZDNet.co.uk)

5 February 2008 | The great migration from IPv4 to IPv6 has officially begun, after ICANN added the first addresses to its root servers that conform to the new version of the internet protocol.


Upcoming Events

10 February - 15 February 2008: 31st 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."