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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 2 February 2007

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


Announcements This Week

2007 ICANN Nominating Committee Issues Formal Call for Statements of Interest

1 February 2007


ICANN in the News

IP's Brave New World (Law.com)

1 February 2007


ICANN At Work

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

  • DOMAINfest Global in Hollywood, California, USA. Staff participated in a panel presentation about internationalized domain names (IDNs), country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).

ICANN Featured Individual: Donna Austin, ccNSO Policy Officer

Donna joined ICANN in February 2005, in the ccNSO Policy Support role which she continues to fill. She has also supported the Nominating Committee in 2005, 2006 and again in 2007, and is the project manager for Accountability Framework discussions with ccTLD managers.

Prior to joining ICANN, Donna had a long career in the Australian Commonwealth Public Service undertaking a range of policy and program positions including managing two grants programs in the Broadcasting Division of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. In 2001/02 Donna represented the Australian Government as the Coordinator of the GAC.

Donna is an Australian national with a Bachelor of Arts in Office Management and has also undertaken post graduate studies in public policy.


Upcoming Events

8 – 9 February 2007 — Domain Pulse, Baden, Switzerland

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."