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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 18 January 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

New-Look Meeting Participation Website Goes Live in Conjunction with New Delhi Schedule of Events

18 January 2008 | Colorful graphics and a modern design outfit this new-look website with improved functionality and usability for visitors. The site is not only an important resource for on-site meeting participants, but also an essential element for those who wish to participate remotely.

ICANN Seeks Expressions of Interest from Auction Design Experts

18 January 2008 | ICANN is seeking expressions of interest from entities experienced in developing and managing auction processes. ICANN has identified several areas where auctions might be an appropriate tool, such as the efficient disposition of data from terminated registrars and registries, the allocation of single-character second-level domain names, and perhaps, resolution of contention between competing commercial applicants for identical strings in the application process for new generic Top Level Domains.

ICANN in the News

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

Are Web domains in Russian, Arabic, and Chinese on the way? (Russia Today)

14 January 2008 | The internet could soon be burst wide open to a broad spectrum of alphabets, including Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic. Testing of domain names in non-Latin alphabets is being carried out by the U.S.-based ICANN.

PTC '08: Return of the R-word (Telecommunications Online)

14 January 2008 | Regulation of NGN unavoidable even if undesirable, say experts.

ICANN at Work

Leo Vegoda attended the 9th UKNOF meeting in London this week. He gave a talk about measuring DNS queries received at the root DNS servers for unallocated IPv4 addresses (http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof9/Vegoda-Unallocated.pdf). About 80 people attended the event. A webcast of the event is available from the web site at http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof9/.

Upcoming Events

10 - 18 January 2008 - SANOG - Dhaka, Bangladesh

4 February 2008 - ESNOG 1 - Madrid, Spain

10 February - 15 February 2008: 31st International Public ICANN Meeting - New Delhi, India

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."