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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 24 November 2006

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Opens Consultation on Latin America and the Caribbean Regional At Large Organisation Organising Instruments

22 November 2006

ICANN in the News

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

The End of the Web as We Know It? (ComputerWeekly.com)

23 November 2006

How Engineers Tamed the Internet's Tower of Babel (Guardian Unlimited)

23 November 2006

International Domains Will Not Be Rushed (PC Pro)

22 November 2006

Web Chief Warns of Domain Name Chaos (The Age)

22 November 2006

ICANN Featured Individual: Demi Getschko, Board Member

Demi Getschko has been involved in international networking since 1987 and was part of the team that created the first Internet connection from Brazil. He has been a member of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee since 1995 and has served as administrative contact for .br since 1989. He played a critical role in the definition of the Brazilian DNS tree and in defining the rules that govern the Brazilian registry.

From 1971 through 1986, Dr. Getschko held a variety of positions within the University of Sao Paulo, from student to faculty to IT Professional. From 1986 through 1996 he was the manager of the Fapesp Data Center, a state foundation that played a central role in the Brazilian academic network. Between 2000 and 2001 he joined iG (Internet Group), a free Internet provider in Brazil, as Chief Technology Officer and Vice-President of Technology.

In 1996, Dr. Getschko became Technology Director at Agencia Estado, an arm of a major Brazilian newspaper, where he is involved in strategic planning, focusing on the technological evolution affecting the information industry.

He holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic Engineering from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Demi was selected for the ICANN Board by the Country Code Names Supporting organisation for a term that will expire six months after the end of the 2006 annual meeting. In December 2005 he was elected to a second term, which will expire six months after the end of the 2009 annual meeting.

ICANN At Work

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

  • The African Development Forum V (ADF V) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Staff represented ICANN in the session, "Youth and ICT."
  • The ccTLD Workshop in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Staff addressed topics such as DNSSEC, IDNs, IANA procedures, ccNSO activities, dispute resolution, registration systems and registration policies.

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."