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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 16 May 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Cairo Selected to Host 33rd International Public Meeting

16 May 2008 | Cairo, Egypt will host the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' 33rd International Public Meeting from 2-7 November 2008.

ICANN in the News

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

ICANN More professionals to be allowed .pro domains (ZDNet.co.uk)

14 May 2008 | The organisation behind .pro has received approval to make the top-level domain available to a wider range of users.

NIST Tool Helps Internet Master Top-level Domains (NIST Tech Beat)

13 May 2008 | At the request of a worldwide Internet organization, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new top-level domains.

Upcoming Events

18 - 24 May 2008 - APTLD - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - full program [PDF, 404 KB]

  • May 18 & 19 (Sunday & Monday) – Attack & Disaster Response Planning Workshop
  • May 20 & 21 (Tuesday & Wednesday) – World Cyber Security Seminar – Organised by MYNIC
  • May 22 & 23 (Thursday & Friday) – APTLD Member's Meeting
  • May 24, 2008 (Saturday) – APTLD Workshops on
    • ccTLD Policy Development Processes
    • ccTLD Marketing
    • Registry Software Options

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

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2008 - 2009 [PDF, 356 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."