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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 7 September 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Solicits Candidates to Develop Request for Proposals for New gTLDs

6 September 2007 | ICANN is posting a statement of work as part of its anticipated program for delegation of new generic top-level domains.

ICANN Completes Renewal of Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel

6 September 2007 | ICANN is pleased to announce that 23 members of the Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel (RSTEP) have agreed to serve for an additional year.

ICANN Posts Communication from the Universal Postal Union (UPU) Regarding its Sponsorship of the .POST Top-Level Domain

6 September 2007 | ICANN continues negotiations with UPU for .POST sTLD.

ICANN in the News

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

Vint Cerf On Bandwidth And The Future Of Internet Television (Wired)

4 Septemer 2007 | Echoing what almost everyone is thinking these days, Vint Cerf thinks that television is dead and internet video delivery will soon be the norm.

Kenya Bids to Host Top IT Conference (The Standard, Nairobi-Kenya)

1 Septemer 2007 | Kenya has submitted a bid to host the African round of the ICANN meeting set for November next year.

ICANN Featured Individual: Barbara Roseman, IANA Operations Manager

Barbara's association with ICANN dates from the year 2000 when, as a manager for Global Crossing, she became a member of the ISPCP Constituency and a member of the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) Address Council. Barbara acted as Chair of the Address Council in 2002. She has also served as a member of the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) Advisory Council.

Barbara has served ICANN in full and part-time consultancy roles since January 2003, providing staff support for the GNSO Council and Task Forces and ongoing participation in the RIR community. She was appointed to the IANA Operations Manager role in March 2005.

Barbara is a U.S. national. She holds a B.A. degree from Mills College.

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."