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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 2 March 2007

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


Announcements This Week

Proposed .MUSEUM sTLD Registry Agreement Posted for Public Comment

2 March 2007

RegisterFly Update

2 March 2007


ICANN in the News

Web Site Owners May Get Tougher to Find (Law.com)

28 February 2007

Registerfly Faces Losing ICANN Accreditation (Ars Technica)

27 February 2007


ICANN At Work

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

  • The APTLD Meeting in Bali, Indonesia. Staff spoke on issues such as Internationalized Domain Names and registrar practices.

ICANN Featured Individual: John L. Crain, Chief Technical Officer

John is currently the Chief Technical Officer at ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (http://www.icann.org). The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions.

Prior to his time at ICANN, John worked as part of the executive management team at the RIPE NCC in Amsterdam (http://www.ripe.net). The RIPE NCC is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that provides Internet resource allocations for Europe and surrounding areas.

John has been directly involved in the administration of Internet Identifiers since his start at the RIPE NCC in 1995 and has worked in all areas of IP address administration.

John also has extensive experience in the area of DNS administration and managing Internet infrastructure services. Currently he is responsible for the management of l.root-servers.net, one of the Internet's 13 "Root Servers" (http://www.root-servers.org)

Before becoming involved in Internet Administration John worked as a Design Engineer in composite materials research and development. In that role John was also responsible for local area networking of Computer Aided Design Systems and for writing and developing custom software applications.


Upcoming Events

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

18 – 23 March 2007 — 68th IETF Meeting, 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."