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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 December 2006

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

Announcements This Week

Update on the 2007 Nom Com Meeting in São Paulo, Brazil

20 December 2006

ICANN in the News

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

UK Organization to Evaluate ICANN Transparency (Ars Technica)

20 December 2006

ICANN Faces Transparency Review (PC Advisor)

20 December 2006

ICANN to Undergo Transparency Review (IT World)

19 December 2006

ICANN Featured Individual: Francisco da Silva, Technical Liaison Group Liaison

Born and raised in Portugal, Francisco has an extensive background in the telecommunications industry. From 1998 until the end of 2002, he was chairman (previously Vice Chairman of Board 1996-1998) of the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) General Assembly. This was during a period in which ETSI initiated and co-created 3GPP and participated in ICANN through the Protocol Supporting Organization. He was elected chairman of the ETSI Board at the end of 2002.

He is Senior Councilor at Portugal Telecom Corporate Headquarters. He is Director of EURESCOM (European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications — Board of Governors) since 1991, and of ETNO (European Telecommunications Network Operators Association — Executive Board) since 1997, assuring also Portugal Telecom's representation at ETNO's General Assembly. He is as well a member of the Portugal Telecom Committee for Technology and Services.

Francisco da Silva has a Degree in Electrical Engineering (Instituto Superior Tenico – Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa). He is the author of books such as "Fronteiras do Futuro" (1994, impacts of the latest scientific and technological revolution on society) and "Narrativa Nova" (1998, dialogues of the Information Society). He is married with two children and resides in Lisbon.

He was selected for the ICANN Board by the Protocol Support Organization (now discontinued) and began service on the Board in December 2002.

Francisco Jesus Silva was selected as non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board by the Technical Liaison Group. His first term as Technical Liaison Group Liaison ended after the conclusion of ICANN's annual meeting in 2004. He has been selected to serve again as the non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board by the Technical Liaison Group through the 2007 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."