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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 March 2007

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


Announcements This Week

Outcome of ccNSO Council Nominations

9 March 2007

RegisterFly Update

8 March 2007

DNS Attack Factsheet

8 March 2007

ICANN Successfully Conducts Laboratory Tests of Internationalised Domain Names

7 March 2007

RegisterFly Update

7 March 2007

Asia/Australia/Pacific At-Large Community MoU with ICANN Open for Public Comment

7 March 2007

African At-Large Community MoU with ICANN Open for Public Comment

7 March 2007

How to Get Help When You Have a Problem with Your Registrar

6 March 2007

ICANN gTLD Registry Data Escrow Report

5 March 2007


ICANN in the News

New Shield Foiled Internet Backbone Attack (CNET News)

9 March 2007

Ousted RegisterFly CEO Regains Reins of Company (Ars Technica)

9 March 2007

International Domain Names Succeed In Testing (ZDNet)

9 March 2007

Last Month's Root-Server Attack Revisited (The Register)

9 March 2007

Successful Trial Puts the Accent on URLs (PC Pro)

8 March 2007

Allegations Fly at RegisterFly (ZDNet)

7 March 2007


ICANN Featured Individual: Karen Lentz, gTLD Registry Liaison

Karen Lentz joined ICANN in March 2003 as gTLD Registry Liaison, helping to establish closer working relationships between ICANN and the gTLD registries and sponsors. She has been involved in a variety of projects at ICANN, including initial implementation of the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, launch of new sTLDs, and several registry proposals for contract changes. Karen also served as the staff coordinator for ICANN's Nominating Committee work in 2003 and 2004. Her current responsibilities include work on contract renewals, compliance activities, and new gTLD implementation planning, in anticipation of the completion of the GNSO's policy development process in this area.

Prior to taking her position at ICANN, Karen managed copyright, permissions, and licensing agreements at Science magazine, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC.

Karen holds undergraduate degrees in English and Political Science, as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing.


Upcoming Events

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."