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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 17 November 2006

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

Announcements This Week

White Paper on ICANN Meetings Posted for Public Comment

15 November 2006

ICANN Posts Draft Version of the 2007 – 2010 Strategic Plan for Comment

12 November 2006 | Based on community consultations and comments to the Issues Paper published in September, ICANN releases its next draft Strategic Plan. Consultations held through the time of the ICANN meeting in São Paulo will inform revisions to this plan. In this release, ICANN thanks the community for the participation and contribution to date and encourages comments concerning this draft. Comments can be made to stratplan-2007@icann.org and reviewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/stratplan-2007.

ICANN in the News

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

ICANN Seeks Input on Improving Transparency and Accountability (Center for Democracy & Technology)

17 November 2006

UAEnic Officials Discuss Domain Name Developments With ICANN (AME Info)

16 November 2006

The ITU and ICANN: An Internet Game of Cat and Mouse (ConsortiumInfo)

13 November 2006

ICANN Featured Individual: Thomas Narten, Board Member

Thomas Narten works on Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He has worked for IBM since 1995 and has been involved in networking for 20 years.

Since 1995, he has been an active contributor in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), co-authoring 10 RFCs, including two core IPv6 specifications. From 1997 to 2005, he was an IETF Area Director for the Internet area. During this time, he focused on strengthening the working relationship between IANA and the IETF and between the IETF and the regional Internet registries community.

Since 2001, he has been an active participant in the development of IPv6 address policy in the RIR community. On the IETF side, he helped develop RFC 3177, "IAB/IESG Recommendations on IPv6 Address Allocations to Sites," which served as input to the RIR discussions. On the RIR side, he participates in public policy discussions in the APNIC, ARIN and RIPE regions and was a key participant in the process that produced the globally-coordinated IPv6 address policy adopted by each of the RIRs in 2002.

Prior to joining IBM, he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at SUNY-Albany (1989-1994). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Board liaison terms end (subject to possible re-appointment) after the conclusion of ICANN's annual meeting each year.

ICANN At Work

During the past week, ICANN staff have provided input to the Internet community at events such as:

Major Upcoming Events

27 November – 1 December 2006: AFRINIC Meeting, Mauritius

2 – 8 December 2006: ICANN Meeting, São Paulo, Brazil

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 2006 – June 2009

Operating Plan (Draft)

Fiscal Year 2006 – 07

Proposed Budget [PDF, 180 KB]

Fiscal Year 2006 – 2007

2 – 8 December 2006 — ICANN Meeting, São Paulo, Brazil

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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."