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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 April 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comments Requested on Discussion Draft of Fast Track Mechanism for Introduction of a Limited Number of IDN ccTLDs

4 April 2008 | The first Discussion Draft of the Interim Report of the IDNC Working Group (IDNC WG) has been published for comment and input from the ICANN community.

ICANN Launches Contractual Compliance Newsletter

3 April 2008 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has launched the Contractual Compliance Newsletter, a newsletter that offers a snapshot of the wide range of compliance work being done by ICANN.

ICANN Issues Advisory Regarding the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy

3 April 2008 | Advisory available at http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-03apr08.htm.

Statement on Joint Project Agreement Welcomed

2 April 2008 | The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers welcomes Wednesday's statement regarding the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) mid-term review from the United States Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

ICANN Calls for Expressions of Interest to Host 2009 Meeting

31 March 2008 | ICANN is actively soliciting expressions of interest from organisations seeking to host the first ICANN International Public Meeting in 2009.

ICANN in the News

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

NomCom Seeks Nominees Into ICANN (ITREALMS)

3 April 2008 | Independent entity in the Internet community, the Nominating Committee (NomCom) is seeking for nominees into the various leadership positions in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and its subsidiary agencies.

ICANN's Meeting in UAE to Discuss Arabic Domain Names Author: BI-ME Staffs (Business Intelligence - Middle East)

30 March 2008 | The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) is co-hosting the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Regional Meeting in cooperation with ICANN.

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

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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."