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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 25 January 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Board Approves Historic F-Root Agreement

23 January 2008 | ICANN has formally approved the Mutual Responsibilities Agreement with the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), the operators of F-Root.

ICANN Formalizes Relationships with ccTLD Manager for Niue

22 January 2008 | ICANN announced that it has signed an Accountability Framework with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .nu—Niue, Internet Users Society Niue (IUS-N).


ICANN in the News

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

The web weans itself off the US (Times Online)

25 January 2008 | After ten years, the body that runs the internet is taking steps to free itself from the hand of the US Government.

Net body issues plea for liberty (BBC News)

24 January 2008 | The overseer of the net's addressing system has asked the US government to be freed from official control.

Exclusive Video Interview of Vint Cerf (Domaine.info)

18 January 2008 | Vint Cerf shares the history of his career.


Upcoming Events

4 February 2008 - ESNOG 1 - Madrid, Spain

10 February - 15 February 2008: 31st International Public ICANN Meeting - New Delhi, India


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 2007 - 2008

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."