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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 April 2007

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

Announcements This Week

Afilias Notice of Fee Change [PDF, 217 KB]

13 April 2007 | Letter from Afilias Vice President Roland LaPlante to ICANN President and CEO Dr. Paul Twomey regarding fee change ...

ICANN in the News

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

Net Reaches Out to Final Frontier (BBC News)

13 April 2007 | A programme to kick-start the use of internet communications in space has been announced by the US government. The Department of Defense's Iris project will put an internet router in space by the start of 2009 ...

DDOS on DNS: Stopping Internet Blackouts (ZDNet)

11 April 2007

Writing in National Journal's Technology Daily, Andrew Noyes discusses the possibility of a massive Internet blackout caused by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the backbone infrastructure of the 'Net...

Invasion of the Internet Snatchers (New York Sun)

9 April 2007 | Last week, a member of the board of the Internet Corporation for the Assignment of Names and Numbers, Susan Crawford, who is also founder of OneWebDay and a professor of law at the Cardozo Law School, analyzed various forms of Internet security failures during a lecture at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. ...

ICANN At Work

ICANN Featured Individual: Nick Ashton-Hart

Nick Ashton-Hart [full profile] is Director of At-Large for ICANN, where he is responsible for assisting and supporting the community of Individual Internet Users engaged in ICANN represent their views and in providing the staf and technical infrastructure to help them do so.

Previously to his engagement to ICANN, he was engaged in providing specialised services to non-governmental organisations, civil society representatives, for-profit and non profit industrial representatives in coalition-building, multilateral treaty development and strategies for being successful in interaction with UN agencies and member states. He specialises in helping disparate groups find common ground on difficult issues and then helping take that consensus and effectively represent it to audiences across the spectrum, political, industrial, for-profit and non-profit.

Upcoming Events

22 – 25 April — ARIN XIX in 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

Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2006 - 2007 [PDF, 172 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."