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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 23 February 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Opens Comment Period on PIR Amendment to Implement Approved Registry Service

22 February 2007

Final Reports of the 2005 and 2006 Nominating Committee

20 February 2007

ICANN in the News

ICANN May Act Against Registerfly (Slashdot)

23 February 2007

ICANN Rides to the Rescue in Registerfly Meltdown (The Register)

23 February 2007

Registrar Threatened With ICANN Shutdown (Computer Business Review)

22 February 2007

Internet is a Reflection of Society, Cerf Says (PC World)

22 February 2007

Web Name Game Can Pay Off (Baltimore Sun)

20 February 2007

ICANN At Work

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

ICANN Featured Individual: Baher Esmat, ICANN Global Partnership - Middle East Liaison

Baher Esmat is the Middle East Liaison of ICANN. He joined ICANN in February 2006 from the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), where he served since 2002, most recently as Telecom Planning Manager, where his responsibilities included projects relating to communications infrastructure and service development within the framework of building Egypt's Information Society.

Prior to joining MCIT, Baher served as a Systems Engineer at Egypt's Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC / RITSEC), where he participated in establishing the first Internet Point of Presence in Egypt servicing the public and private sectors; and a Systems Consultant with Newbridge Networks, later acquired by Alcatel.

Baher is a former member of the WSIS Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), and served as Chair of the Egyptian IPv6 Task Force until his joining ICANN.

Baher received a Bachelor Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Cairo University in June 1993, and a Master Degree in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo in June 1999.

Upcoming Events

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

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

18 – 23 March 2007 — 68th IETF, 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."