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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 April 2007

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

Announcements This Week

VeriSign Notice of Fee Change [PDF, 32 KB]

5 April 2007

ICANN in the News

Please note that these links lead to external news stories. ICANN is not responsible for the content of these pages.

ICANN Weighs Recommendation to Go Private (InformationWeek)

5 April 2007 | Looking to fortify its charter, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently released a report indicating it would like to change its legal status and become a private entity ...

Prices for '.com' and '.net' to Rise (MSNBC)

5 April 2007 | The master-keeper of Internet addresses ending in ".com" and ".net" — two of the most popular domain name suffixes — said Thursday it would raise fees charged to register those names ...

ICANN Featured Individual: Kim Davies, IANA Technical Liaison

Kim Davies joined ICANN as IANA Technical Liaison. His primary responsibilities are for DNS root zone management, and other domain name related aspects of IANA's work.

Kim's previous role was as Technical Policy Advisor to CENTR, the Council of European National TLD Registries. His role on the CENTR secretariat, and his representation of European country code managers in international fora, brought additional knowledge and expertise to ICANN as ICANN continues to strengthen its service to IANA customers, particularly TLD managers. Kim's appointment continues to show ICANN's commitment to serving a global Internet community.

Prior to his appointment at CENTR Kim held a number of appointments concerned with Domain and ISP management, including as Head of Web Services for iiNet, an Internet Access company. He was also on the board of the .au domain manager auDA from its founding through to 2005, and was responsible for commissioning and operating a key Australian Internet exchange point. Kim was also the Principal of Cynosure Innovation, an Internet consulting business.

Upcoming Events

22 – 25 April 2007 — ARIN XIX, San Juan, Puerto Rico

28 April 2007 — AFTLD Annual General Meeting at AfriNIC in Abuja, Nigeria

25 – 29 June 2007 — ICANN Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico

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

Operating Plan (Draft) Fiscal Year 2007 – 2008

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."