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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 28 September 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Nominating Committee Announces New Board Members and Supporting Organisation Roles

25 September 2007 | The 2007 Nominating Committee received 93 Statements of Interest, drawn from all five of the geographic regions during an open nominating period that ran from 1 February 2007 to 18 May 2007. 12 candidates were female and 81 were male. 25 candidates were from North America, 23 candidates were from Europe, 23 were from Asia/Australia/Pacific, 13 were from Africa and 11 were from Latin America/Caribbean. Some candidates are counted in more than one region due to dual citizenship. Those selected will assume their duties at the conclusion of the ICANN Annual Meeting for 2007 in Los Angeles, California on 2 November 2007.

ICANN in the News

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

Montenegro Ready to Go Live (DomainesInfo)

27 September 2007 | Domaines.Info spoke to the .ME registry's technical manager, who explained Montenegro's plans for going live on the Internet, following the ICANN's board decision earlier this month to delegate .ME to the country's government.

ICANN Featured Individual: Gabriella Schittek, ccNSO Secretariat

Gabriella Schittek is responsible for running the ccNSO Secretariat. Before joining ICANN in January 2007, she worked for the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries as Communications and Projects Officer, as well as at Nominet - the country code domain registry for .UK. She holds an MA degree in Political Science from the University of Passau in Germany.

Upcoming Events

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

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

19-21 October 2007 - Taipei Regional Meeting: "Toward the New Era of Internet"

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."