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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 22 June 2007

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


Announcements This Week

ICANN Posts Draft Management Operating Principles for Community Consultation

23 June 2007 | Read the Draft Management Operating Principles [PDF, 160 KB]

ccNSO Regions Working Group Report of the ICANN Geographical Regions Posted for Public Comments [PDF, 65 KB]

22 June 2007

Summary and Analysis of Responses to Request for Public Comments and Dialogue on ICANN's Performance

20 June 2007 | On May 8 2007, as part of an ongoing interest in continuous improvement, ICANN sought community feedback about its performance ...

ICANN Posts Request for Proposals for Independent Evaluator for At-Large Advisory Committee Review, and Final Terms of Reference for This Review

20 June 2007 | Request for Proposals for Independent Evaluator for At-Large Advisory Committee Review [PDF, 17 KB] and Final Terms of Reference [PDF, 29 KB]

ICANN Releases Draft IDN Evaluation Plans

19 June 2007 | As announced previously in the IDN program status report, in the draft IANA Root Zone Procedures for Test IDN Deployment, and the draft IDN TLD Root Server Performance / Tolerance, ICANN has developed a plan for insertion of IDN TLDs in the root zone for evaluation.

Public Comments Sought on GNSO Improvements

19 June 2007 | The Board Governance Committee's GNSO Review Working Group (BGC WG) spent the past several weeks considering reviews of the GNSO and its Council and extensive input on GNSO improvements to determine whether, in general, the GNSO has a continuing purpose in the ICANN structure and, if so, whether any change in structure or operations is desirable to improve its effectiveness (as required in the Bylaws)...

IDN Program Status Report

18 June 2007 | In preparation for the San Juan meeting and to provide better insight into the plan for the eventual deployment of internationalized top-level labels, ICANN released today a status report describing IDN Program activities.

RSSAC Statement on ICANN's Proposed Next Steps for IDN Deployment in the Root Zone

18 June 2007 | The DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) has been asked for a statement on ICANN's proposed next steps for IDN deployment in the root zone...


ICANN Featured Individual: David Conrad - General Manager IANA

David Conrad works for ICANN as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) General Manager. A long time participant in Internet technical circles, David first began working with Internet technologies in 1983 leading teams developing Internet-related products and services. Living in Japan from 1991 to 1998, he was employee #7 at Internet Initiative Japan, one of the first commercial ISPs in Japan and was founder and the first Director-General of the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) from 1993 to 1998. Returning to the US in 1998, he was Executive Director of the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) from 1998 - 2001 and founder and CTO of Nominum, Inc. from 2001 - 2005. David also served as a board member of the North American regional IP address registry, ARIN, from 2000 to 2005 and as ARIN treasurer from 2004 to 2005.


Upcoming Events

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."