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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 26 January 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Opens Public Comment Period on ICANN Fee Amendment from .MOBI

26 January 2007

ICANN Posts Summary of Responses On Accountability and Transparency

26 January 2007

ICANN Formalizes Relationship with ccTLD Manager for Belgium

25 January 2007

Call for Nominations for the ccNSO Council

23 January 2007

ICANN in the News

Lack of Space May Force World Wide Web to Implode (Times Online)

26 January 2007

Internet Chucks ".um" for U.S. Isles (BusinessWeek)

24 January 2007

ICANN Hires Journalist Critic (ZDNet)

22 January 2007

ICANN Featured Individual: Dr. Steve Crocker, Chair, Security and Stability Advisory Committee

Dr. Steve Crocker sits on the ICANN board as a non-voting liaison representing the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Dr. Crocker is CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc., a start-up company focused on dynamic sharing of information across the Internet. He is also on the board of the Internet Society and is a volunteer Senior Counselor in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer in the District of Columbia, focusing on the District's creation of a new technology magnet high school.

Dr. Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the Arpanet and laid the foundation for today's Internet. He organized the Network Working Group, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force and initiated the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which protocol designs are documented and shared. He remains active in Internet standards work through the IETF and IAB. For this work, Dr. Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award.

Dr. Crocker's experience includes research management at DARPA, USC/ISI and tThe Aerospace Corporation, vice president of Trusted Information Systems, and co-founder of CyberCash, Inc. and Longitude Systems, Inc.

Dr. Crocker earned his B.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in computer science at UCLA, and he studied artificial intelligence at MIT.

Steve Crocker's was selected as non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. 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."