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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 31 August 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Updated Proposed .MUSEUM sTLD Registry Agreement Posted for Public Comment

31 August 2007 | An updated version of the proposed .MUSEUM sponsorship agreement is posted today for public comment.


ICANN in the News

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

China sale spurs domain name boom (CBC News - Canada)

30 August 2007 | An aggressive price promotion in China of website domain names with the ".cn" top-level domain helped spur a fivefold increase in the number of websites using the suffix, according to the company that operates many of the web's core directories.

ICANN Tests IDN TLD (Live!) (CircleID)

28 August 2007 | William Tan discusses ICANN's IDN TLD test bed plan which includes translations of the string .test into eleven written languages (Arabic, Chinese-simplified, Chinese-traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish) and ten scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Tamil).


ICANN Featured Individual: Kurt Pritz, Senior Vice President, Services

Kurt Pritz is a qualified and practicing attorney with an impressive 20-year Corporate career in Executive Operational roles. As Vice President, Production at Walt Disney Imagineering, Mr. Pritz directed the engineering and manufacture of theme park shows worldwide. Prior to that, he worked as Plant Manager supervising over 200 employees for Eaton Corporation, the manufacture of electronic assemblies and avionics sub-systems. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Physics, an M.B.A. and a J.D.


Upcoming Events

29 August - 7 September 2007 - APNIC 24 - New Delhi, India

29 August - 7 September 2007 - SANOG 10 - New Delhi, India

23 - 28 September 2007 - AfriNIC 7 - Durban, South Africa

17-19 October 2007 - ARIN XX - Albuquerque, NM, USA

22-26 October 2007 - RIPE 55 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

29 October - 2 November 2007: 30th International Public ICANN Meeting - Los Angeles, CA USA


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 2007 - 2008 [PDF, 426 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."