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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 18 May 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Publishes Registrar Website Compliance Audit Report

18 May 2007 | ICANN performed a Registrar Website Compliance Audit of all ICANN-Accredited Registrars' websites to determine compliance with Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) requirements.

ICANN Posts Proposed 2007-08 Budget

17 May 2007 | In accordance with its bylaws, ICANN has posted the Proposed Budget for fiscal year 2007-08.

ICANN Requests Proposals to Provide Registrar Data Escrow Services

17 May 2007 | ICANN is requesting proposals to provide gTLD registrar data escrow services.

Location of Third ICANN Meeting for 2007

17 May 2007 | ICANN advises that the public meeting scheduled to be held from 29 October through 2 November 2007 will take place in Los Angeles, California, USA.

ICANN Extends Public Comment Period on Proposed .COOP Renewal Agreement

16 May 2007 | ICANN seeks consultation on continuation of delegated policy-making authority to TLD Sponsors

ICANN Accredits First Registrar in Senegal

14 May 2007 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has signed its first accreditation agreement with a Senegal-based Registrar – Kheweul.com SA from Dakar.

ICANN in the News

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

The End User: Positions on ICANN, the Internet Addressing Agency, are Open (International Herald Tribune)

16 May 2007 | Has the novelty of the Internet worn off? Vinton Cerf, chief Internet evangelist for Google and one of the Internet's founding fathers, suspects that after 30-some years, it may well have.

ICANN Kit Teaches Software New Domain Names (Computerworld)

16 May 2007 | The list of generalised "top-level" internet domains (gTLDs) continues to grow, but many applications can recognise only some of these new domain suffixes.

ICANN Featured Individual: Maria Farrell, GNSO Policy Officer

Maria Farrell is an Irish national and studied History and Politics at University College Dublin (1990 - 1994) and worked in film and television production in Ireland and the UK for four years. She received an MA in Interactive Media from the Dublin Institute of Technology in 1999 and an MSc in Government from the London School of Economics in 2000. She is currently pursuing an MBA part-time at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School in Belgium.

In her prior career, Maria was Policy Manager for E-Business, IT and Telecoms at the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris from 2002 to 2004. Prior to this, she worked in London as Policy Executive on Electronic Law at the Law Society of England and Wales, and Policy Adviser on E-Business for the Confederation of British Industry.

Upcoming Events

15 - 25 May, IGF Consultations, Geneva, Switzerland

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

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."