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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 1 June 2007

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

Announcements This Week

ICANN Moves Forward Towards Introduction Of Internationalized Top Level Labels (IDNs) in the DNS

2 June 2007 | ICANN has posted a set of draft procedures describing how IANA will manage the insertion, administration and removal of internationalized top-level labels (as delegated A-records) in the DNS root zone. These procedures are intended to guide an evaluation plan providing for the insertion and monitoring of sample IDNs into the root zone later this year.

Building Towards a Comprehensive Registry Failover Plan

1 June 2007 | This report is being prepared as part of the registry failover project to provide guidance to ICANN and the Internet community in the event of a registry failure. This is not intended to be a policy document.

Update Regarding ICANN's Registrar Data Escrow Request For Proposals

1 June 2007 | In advance of the 8 June 2007 deadline for submission of Registrar Data Escrow proposals, ICANN is soliciting questions regarding the terms of the RFP and technical specifications of the RDE program from potential applicants.

ICANN Formalizes Relationship with ccTLD Manager for Mongolia

1 June 2007 | ICANN announced today that it has signed an accountability framework with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .mn--Mongolia, Datacom LTD

Update on the 2007 ICANN Nominating Committee

30 May 2007 | This is an update on the 2007 ICANN Nominating Committee (Nom Com).

ICANN Welcomes GoDaddy.com Takeover of RegisterFly Data

29 May 2007 | Direct, automatic transfer of domain names imminent under business deal

ICANN in the News

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

Ailing Web Registry to Transfer Names (Baltimore Sun)

30 May 2007 | GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials said ...

GoDaddy to Adopt 850K Orphaned Domains (E-Commerce News)

29 May 2007 | Domain name registrar and Web site hosting firm GoDaddy has reached an agreement to take over tens of thousands of domain names maintained by a rival firm that is about to lose its accreditation to register and host Web addresses.

ICANN at Work

  • Africa Liaison Anne-Rachel Inne and Middle East Liaison Baher Esmat participated in the First African ccTLD Workshop "Building Local Internet Community" held in Cairo on 28-30 May 2007. The workshop was hosted by the Egyptian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), and attended by 30 participants representing 13 African ccTLD registries, NTRA, ICANN, APTLD, dot CZ, as well as members of the Internet community in Egypt.

    Inne gave a presentation around ICANN, some of the work being done at present, funding, implications for ccTLDs, the fellowship programme, and redelegation issues. Questions involved the role of African ccTLDs with regard to the ICANN budget.

    Esmat gave an introduction on IDN basics and an update on the status of IDN development. Discussion covered the role of the Internet community in assisting African ccTLD registries prepare for IDNs, similar to current efforts involving IPv6 and DNSSEC.

    Workshop programme and details can be found at: http://www.aftld.org/cairo2007/index.html.

ICANN Featured Individual: John L. Crain, Chief Technical Officer

Born: Leicester, England

John is currently the Chief Technical Officer at ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (http://www.icann.org). The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions.

Prior to his time at ICANN, John worked as part of the executive management team at the RIPE NCC in Amsterdam (http://www.ripe.net). The RIPE NCC is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that provides Internet resource allocations for Europe and surrounding areas.

John has been directly involved in the administration of Internet Identifiers since his start at the RIPE NCC in 1995 and has worked in all areas of IP address administration.

John also has extensive experience in the area of DNS administration and managing Internet infrastructure services. Currently he is responsible for the management of l.root-servers.net, one of the Internet's 13 "Root Servers" (http://www.root-servers.org)

Before becoming involved in Internet Administration John worked as a Design Engineer in composite materials research and development. In that role John was also responsible for local area networking of Computer Aided Design Systems and for writing and developing custom software applications.

Upcoming Events

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."