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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 8 October 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

Fellowship Program Brings Global Voices Together at ICANN

8 October 2010 | Global input and ideas will be on the rise at the 39th International Public Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers thanks to ICANN's on-going Fellowship program.

ICANN and UNESCO Working Together Towards Successful Implementation of IDN ccTLDs

7 October 2010 | ICANN and UNESCO, in a letter of intent, have Identified the first area of joint collaboration in furtherance of the December 2009 Cooperation Agreement.

Root Server Scaling Reports Released for Public Comment

6 October 2010 | ICANN is releasing two documents pertaining to its ongoing efforts to ensure DNS (Domain Name System) stability of in light of potential root zone growth due to the delegation of new gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domains). Both documents are for public comment until 5 November.

Bulk Transfer of 4Domains's Domains to Internet.bs

6 October 2010 | ICANN has authorized a bulk transfer of 4Domains, Inc.'s gTLD domain names to Internet.bs Corp., due to a compliance action taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of registrar 4Domains.

Application Round Opens for San Francisco Fellowships

5 October 2010 | ICANN is launching the 12th round of applications for the Fellowship program, to facilitate participation in ICANN's 40th International Public Meeting to be held San Francisco, California on 13-18 March 2011.

Safety and Security Plan for ICANN Meetings

5 October 2010 | As announced earlier within the updated Plan for Enhancing Internet Security, Stability & Resiliency, ICANN is posting the Safety and Security Plan for ICANN International Public Meetings.

Updated - Public Comment: FY 11 Update to Plan for Enhancing Internet Security, Stability & Resiliency

4 October 2010 | ICANN is providing an update to the public comment period on the FY 11 SSR Plan, with the posting of translations in Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish (note – the Chinese translation will be added early next week). Accordingly, the comment period is being extended to 3 November 2010 23:59 UTC.

Public Comment: Feedback Requested on the Public Participation Committee Webinar Information

4 October 2010 | The ICANN Participation and Engagement Staff, in conjunction with the work of the Board Public Participation Committee (PPC), provided two webinar briefing sessions on Monday 27 September at 15.00 and 24.00 UTC. If you are not able to participate in either of the two live sessions, we would like to encourage you to go through the slides and the MP3 file and to provide your feedback.


Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

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, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

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."