Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 5 January 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Publishes Revised Proposed Agreement on .XXX

5 January 2007

RSSAC and SSAC Seek Community Feedback on Firewall Support for IPv6 DNS Records and DNS Extensions (EDNS0)

5 January 2007

ICANN Announces Plans for Conclusion of sTLD Application Process

4 January 2007

ICANN in the News

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

Virtual Reality Group Wants To Create "Neuronet" (Ars Technica)

2 January 2007

Group Promises Dedicated VR "Neuronet," Skepticism Ensues (Engadget)

1 January 2007

First The Net, Now The Neuronet (p2pnet)

30 December 2006

ICANN At Work

ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey congratulated the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) on the opening of their new offices at a ceremony in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 11 December 2006. Also attending were Raul Echeberria, CEO of LACNIC, Oscar Messano, Chairman of the Board of LACNIC, and Rodolfo Nin Novoa, Vice President of Uruguay. Photos of the event provided courtesy of ICANN Latin American Liaison Pablo Hinojosa.

ICANN Featured Individual: Peter Dengate Thrush, Board Member

Peter Dengate Thrush is a barrister practicing in civil litigation and specializing in intellectual property, competition and Internet law.

He was the legal advisor to InternetNZ in 1996 – 1999, advising it on the formation of its registry company (Domainz) and acting in early domain name disputes in which the registry was named. He served as chair from December 1999 for two terms. He is currently Chair of InternetNZ's International Affairs Committee, and a member of its Legal and Regulatory Committee (see www.internetnz.org.nz).

He has been active in the setting up and developing of APTLD, the body of national domain name registry managers for the Asia Pacific region, and is currently its chair (see www.aptld.org).

Peter has been involved in ICANN since its inception. As a member of the Boston Working Group, he provided comment in 1998 on the early drafts of the ICANN bylaws, and as President of AIPPI-NZ he co-chaired one of the preformation meetings of the Intellectual Property Constituency in Wellington, New Zealand. In 1999 he was appointed to ICANN's Independent Review Advisory Committee, or IRAC, a multi-national panel of legal experts charged with defining the principles of independent review of the actions of the Board of ICANN. He contributed to InternetNZ's submission to WIPO 1, and served on ICANN's Working Group A, which led to the development of the UDRP. He is currently on the WSIS Workshop Working Group.

He has been a leader of the ccTLD community, serving for many years on the Administrative Committee of the World Wide Alliance of ccTLDs. In that role he originated the call for the formation of a Support Organization for ccTLDs in ICANN and chaired the many meetings at which its bylaws were debated (see www.wwtld.org). He served on the launching group of the ccNSO and was selected as a board member after an international vote of ccTLD managers in the ccNSO in December 2004.

Peter Dengate Thrush was selected for the ICANN Board by the Country Code Names Supporting Organization. His term began in 2005 and he was selected for a full term which expires six months after the conclusion of 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

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please visit http://www.icann.org/communications/#newsletter

If you have questions or comments about this mailing list, send an email to ICANN-Newsletter@icann.org

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."