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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 12 October 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Opens Media Registration for Los Angeles Meeting

10 October 2007 | ICANN has launched its media registration service for journalists planning on covering the 30th International Public Meeting being held in Los Angeles, California, from 29 October to 2 November 2007.

On Its Way: One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet

9 October 2007 | ICANN will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages.

New Delhi Chosen as Site of ICANN's 31st Public Meeting

9 October 2007 | New Delhi, India will host ICANN's 31st International Public Meeting from 10-15 February 2008.

ICANN in the News

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

What's the Hindi Word for Dot-Com? (The Wall Street Journal)

11 October 2007 | Long-dominated by English, the language of its founders, the Internet is about to take a big step toward becoming a truly world-wide Web. Starting on Monday, Web surfers will be able to test Internet addresses in 11 languages that don't use the Roman alphabet — the 26 letters used in English and most other European languages.

The Internet Goes Polyglot (Datamonitor)

10 October 2007 | You won't have noticed, but yesterday the internet's plumbing underwent one of its most fundamental changes in 20 years. The domain name system now supports 11 non-English languages, for the first time in their native non-Roman scripts.

ICANN Featured Individual: Amy Stathos, Senior Counsel, Office of the General Counsel

With nearly thirteen years of litigation experience, Amy Stathos joined ICANN in May 2006 as Senior Counsel, Office of the ICANN General Counsel. Prior to joining ICANN, Amy practiced for several years at Jones Day where she handled complex business and class action litigation with a strong emphasis on both federal and state antitrust and unfair competition matters. Her extensive litigation experience with many national and international clients, such major retailers, telecommunications companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, health care providers, oil and gas producers and manufacturers and suppliers in the aerospace industry, makes her extremely well-qualified for her position with ICANN.

In addition to her work with ICANN, Amy has served for over four years on the Editorial Board of the ABA Antitrust Section online publication, The Antitrust Source. Prior to this appointment, Amy served as a vice chairperson of the Civil Practice and Procedure Committee of the ABA Antitrust Section. She also has published on the topic of competition law and been a contributing drafter to Antitrust Law Developments (fifth edition), to the "Annual Updates" of that publication, and to the ABA sponsored Antitrust Evidence Handbook.

Amy holds a B.A. in Communications Studies from UCLA, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Southwestern University School of Law and her California Bar membership in 1993.

Upcoming Events

19-21 October 2007 - Taipei Regional Meeting: "Toward the New Era of Internet"

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 USA

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."