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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 May 2007

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


Announcements This Week

ICANN Publishes IDN Glossary

2 May 2007 | In an attempt to ensure that discussions regarding IDNs take place in a consistent manner, ICANN has published an IDN Glossary.

ICANN Nominating Committee Extends Deadline for Statements of Interest to 18 May 2007

30 April 2007 | In order to provide additional time for candidates to submit Statements of Interest, the 2007 ICANN Nominating Committee has extended the deadline for Statements of Interest until 18 May 2007 23:59 UTC.


ICANN in the News

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

Interview: Savenaca Vocea - Why the Islands Need to be Part of ICANN (Islands Business, Fiji)

2 May 2007 | Islands Business Magazine interviews Brisbane-based Savenaca Vocea, who represents ICANN in the Australasia/Pacific region as its liaison ...

New Study Looks at Web Brandjacking (Sci-Tech Today)

1 May 2007 | MarkMonitor found more than 286,000 instances of cybersquatting for the 25 brands it studied -- an average of 11,400 instances each ...


ICANN At Work

ICANN staff members David Conrad and Leo Vegoda attended the ARIN XIX open policy meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 22-25 April 2007. The 147 attendees discussed more than a dozen active policy proposals dealing with the management of the IPv4 and IPv6 address space. There were also two panel discussions about legacy IPv4 address space, IPv6 transition and the diminishing pool of unallocated address space.

More details:


ICANN Featured Individual: Kent Crispin, Technical Systems Manager

Kent Crispin became Technical Systems Manager at ICANN on 4 February 2002. Prior to that time, he was with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for twenty-two years as a Computer Scientist. He has varied and extensive experience, in areas such as operating system development, computer and network security, network protocols, software design and development, and network and computer center operations. Mr. Crispin has been using the Internet since the early 1980s, has run a small Internet consulting and web hosting business, and been an active participant in domain name policy issues since 1996.

Mr. Crispin holds a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University (1980), and prior to that had a long and checkered career as a "professional student", studying Computer Science, Geology, Mathematics, Music, and other subjects.


Upcoming Events

6 May, 16th CENTR Technical Workshop, Tallinn, Estonia

7-11 May, RIPE 54, Tallinn, Estonia

21-25 May, LACNIC X, Isla Margarita, Venezuela

15-25 May, IGF Consultations, Geneva, Switzerland

28-30 May, AfTLD ccTLD Workshop, Cairo, Egypt

3-6 June, APTLD Meeting, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

8-9 June, CENTR 33th General Assembly, Helsinki, Finland

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."