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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 April 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Posts Schedule for Paris Meeting 22-26 June

9 April 2008 | ICANN has posted the schedule for its public Meeting to be held in Paris 22-26 June.

Partnering to Promote Internet Education in Russia

9 April 2008 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Lomonosov Moscow State University Institute of Information Security Issues (IISI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to work together on increasing awareness on Internet issues inside Russia.

Less than a Week to Apply for ICANN Leadership Positions

The deadline for Statements of Interest for ICANN leadership positions through the 2008 Nominating Committee is 15 April 2008 23:59 UTC. If you are interested in applying for one of the positions listed below, see http://nomcom.icann.org.

The following positions are being filled this year:

  • 2 Board Directors
  • 1 GNSO Council member
  • 1 ccNSO Council member
  • 2 ALAC members (who will represent Europe and North American regions)

ICANN in the News

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

Terremark Hosts ICANN Infrastructure (WHIR News)

8 April 2008 | Data center operator and hosting provider Terremark Worldwide announced on Tuesday that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has chosen to house its second instance of the Global L-Root server cluster at Terremark's flagship facility, the NAP of the Americas.

.BIZ and INFO's anti-tasting measures okayed (DomainesInfo)

7 April 2008 | ICANN has just approved modifications requested a few weeks ago by the .BIZ and .INFO registries to limit domain tasting. From now on, no registrar will be able to freely delete more than 10% of the names it registers monthly.

Upcoming Events

7 - 11 April 2008 - AFTLD Meeting - Johannesburg, South Africa

20 June 2008 - EGENI Europe 2008 - Paris, France

22 - 27 June 2008: 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Paris, France

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."