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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 January 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Releases Annual Report for 2005-2006

19 January 2007

ICANN Announces New Staff Appointments

17 January 2007

ICANN in the News

ICANN Hires Critic McCarthy (Guardian Unlimited)

18 January 2007

U.S. No Net Governance Changes Expected (CNET News)

16 January 2007

U.N. Telecom Not Eying Internet Control (CIO Today)

15 January 2007

ICANN At Work

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

ICANN Featured Individual: Vittorio Bertola, At Large Advisory Committee Liaison

Vittorio Bertola sits on the ICANN board as a non-voting liaison representing the At-Large Advisory Committee. From Turin, Italy, Vittorio holds a degree cum laude in Electronical Engineering from Politecnico di Torino. He deals with the Internet in all its aspects, including technical, business, social and political matters, as an entrepreneur, writer, activist and engineer.

While working as a freelance consultant in policy and technical projects, he is also a partner in Dynamic Fun, a company he cofounded that lies among the innovation leaders in Italy for what pertains to the usage of wireless and Internet technologies to improve logistical and commercial processes in corporations and to enhance public services. He was previously a promoter of Vitaminic, one of the most successful dot-com companies in Italy, serving as its Vice President for Technology, a position he held from the foundation of the company through its multinational growth and IPO in Milan's New Market. He previously worked for Omnitel (now Vodafone Italy) and for Politecnico di Torino where, as a student, he was an elected Board Member.

He is often busy as a conference speaker, a renowned blogger and a writer for Italian newsletters and magazines. He has also dealt for many years with Internet policies at the national and international level. He was a member of the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), appointed by the UN Secretary General, Mr. Kofi Annan, and is a member of the Internet Governance Consulting Committee of the Italian government, appointed by Minister Luigi Nicolais. He represents the global Internet users on the Board of ICANN, the global policy-making entity for Internet domain names. He is a Councillor of Società Internet, the Italian chapter of the Internet Society, and served as a member on the policy boards of top-level domain names such as .it and .mobi. Over the past ten years, he has promoted a number of online initiatives, which have made him a well known figure on the Italian Internet.

Vittorio Bertola was selected as non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board by the At-Large Advisory Committee in December 2006. Board liaison terms end (subject to possible re-appointment) after the conclusion of ICANN's annual meeting each year.

Upcoming Events

12 February 2007 — RIPE NCC Roundtable, Amsterdam, Netherlands

21 February 2007 – 2 March 2007 — APRICOT 2007, Bali, Indonesia

26 February 2007 – 2 March 2007 — APNIC 23, Bali, Indonesia

8 – 9 March 2007 — CENTR General Assembly, Prague, Czech Republic

26 – 30 March 2007 — ICANN Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal

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 [PDF, 72 KB]

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2006 – 2007

Proposed Budget Fiscal Year 2006 – 2007 [PDF, 180 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."