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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 15 December 2006

A weekly electronic newsletter from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Reminder of Request for Comments on ICANN Accountability and Transparency Management Operating Principles

14 December 2006

ICANN Seeks Public Comments on Proposed Terms of Reference for Independent Review of the Nominating Committee

12 December 2006

CFIT's Complaint Dismissed For A Second Time

11 December 2006

ICANN in the News

Listed below are media mentions involving ICANN over the course of the last week:

The Great Internet Brand Rip-Off (BusinessWeek)

15 December 2006

Soviet Websites Marked for Liquidation (Kommersant)

12 December 2006

ICANN to Revamp Domain Name System (PC Advisor)

11 December 2006

ICANN Featured Individual: Steven Goldstein, Board Member

Steven N. Goldstein retired from the National Science Foundation in 2003. He had joined NSF in 1989 as a Program Director in the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate's networking division. Prior to his joining NSF, he was a MITRE Corporation contractor to NASA, helping to establish the NASA Science Network, NASA's entry into TCP/IP research networking.

At NSF, Dr. Goldstein quickly gravitated to the international arena and launched the International Connections Management (ICM) project, awarded to Sprint, in 1991. Over the next six years, ICM implemented the connection of academic networks from about 25 countries to the NSFnet and to its advanced networking successor, the vBNS. ICM made the first academic connection with Russia in 1994, and two with China in 1995. The last country to be connected was Mongolia, in early 1996. Dr. Goldstein also managed a series of awards to the Network Startup Resource Center, NSRC, (http://www.nsrc.org), which assisted grassroots organizations in many under-networked countries to establish Internet connectivity. NSRC has been a major player in training network operators in sub-Saharan Africa and in supporting SSA networks in the formation of the African Network Operators Group (AFNOG).

By the mid-1990's, Dr. Goldstein had shifted his focus to even more advanced international networking under the High Performance International Internet Services project (HPIIS). Under HPIIS, a high-performance link with Russia was implemented, first as MirNet, and in a later more advanced version, as NaukaNet. He served as the U.S. representative to the G7 Global Information Society initiative entitled "Global Interoperability of Broadband Networks" (GIBN). To further the GIBN goals, he made an award to implement the international networking meet-point, STAR TAP (http://www.startap.net) and, as the technology progressed, its transition to the optical-networking meet-point, StarLight (http://www.startap.net/starlight/).

Dr. Goldstein helped to guide the high-impact HPIIS follow-on to NaukaNet, the Global Ring for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD, http://www.gloriad.org/). GLORIAD has constructed a dedicated lightwave round-the-world link, initially connecting the U.S., Russia and China. Recently, Canada, Netherlands and Korea as well as the Nordic backbone association, NORDUnet, joined the enterprise.

In his final tour at NSF's Engineering Directorate, Dr. Goldstein developed the strategy for the Information Technology subsystems for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, NEES (http://www.nees.org).

Steven Goldstein was selected by the 2006 Nominating Committee to serve as a Board Member. His current term will run from the end of the 2006 Annual Meeting through the conclusion of the 2009 Annual Meeting.

Major Upcoming Events

26 – 30 March 2007: ICANN Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal

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 [PDF, 72 KB]

July 2007 – June 2010

Operating Plan (Draft)

Fiscal Year 2006 – 07

Proposed Budget [PDF, 180 KB]

Fiscal Year 2006 – 2007

26 – 30 March 2007 — ICANN Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal

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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."