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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 19 October 2007

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Posts Draft of Strategic Plan for Consultation

19 October 2007 | ICANN today posted the first draft of the July 2008 — June 2011 Strategic Plan for community consultation. The plan is available in English [PDF, 80 KB], Français [PDF, 1.09 MB], Español [PDF, 1.18 MB], العربية [PDF, 376 KB], Русский [PDF, 1.44 MB] and 中文 [PDF, 348 KB].

Board Governance Committee Posts Proposed "GNSO Improvements"

19 October 2007 | A set of proposed GNSO improvements have been issued and will be discussed at a 29 October workshop sponsored by the Board Governance Committee at ICANN's Los Angeles meeting.

ICANN Publishes 2007 Semi-Annual Contractual Compliance Audit Report

18 October 2007 | This report summarizes ICANN's audit activities from January through September 2007. During this period, ICANN completed five registrar contractual compliance audits and two registry contractual compliance audits.

ICANN Posts Next Draft of Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles for Consultation

17 October 2007 | These documents have been in development since late 2006. The process began with a consultation which asked the community for their views on accountability and transparency at ICANN.

ICANN Establishes Forum on Allocation Methods for Single-Letter and Single-Digit Domain Names

16 October 2007 | As recommended by the GNSO Council, ICANN is commencing a forum on potential allocation methods for single-letter and single-digit domain names at the second level in gTLD registries. Examples include a.com, i.info, 4.mobi, 8.org. Since revenue will result from this allocation, comments regarding the potential uses for this revenue are also requested.

My Name, My Language, My Internet: IDN Test Goes Live

15 October 2007 | Internet users around the globe can now experiment with their name in their language on their Internet with today's launch of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers live testing of Internationalized Domain Names in 11 languages: العربية | 简体中文 | 繁體中文 | Ελληνικά | हिन्दी | 日本語 | 한국어 | فارسی | Русский | ייִדיש

GNSO Consideration of Proposed Changes to WHOIS

15 October 2007

ICANN in the News

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

Internet preparing to go into outer space SEOUL (AFP)

17 October 2007 | After expanding across Earth, the Internet is now set to spread into outer space to reach parts no network has gone before, one of its co-creators predicted Wednesday. Vinton Cerf said the proposed "interplanetary" Internet would allow people an ability "to access information and to control experiments taking place far away" from Earth.

ICANN to Test Domain Names in 11 Languages (PC World)

15 October 2007 | The organization that oversees the Internet address system is launching an evaluation of International Domain Names (IDN) that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages..

ICANN Featured Individual: Cheryl Smith, Accounting Manager

Cheryl Smith is the Accounting Manager at ICANN. She has over 15 years of accounting and management experience and has worked for several notable financial institutions including Northern Trust Bank. Most recently she served as the Controller for SkillJam Technologies and Denim Revolution.

Cheryl is also a published author of a book of poetry, In The Note of C, www.inthenoteofc.com. She counterbalances her analytical thinking with her passion for artistic writing.

Cheryl holds a BS in Management from Pepperdine University.

Upcoming Events

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."