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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 July 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

FY11 Operating Plan and Budget Adopted by Board in Brussels is Now Posted

9 July 2010 | On 25 June 2010 in Brussels, the ICANN Board approved the FY11 Operating Plan and Budget, which describes the planned activities and required resources for this fiscal year.

Call for Expressions of Interest for 2010-2011 Nominating Committee Chair

9 July 2010 | ICANN is immediately seeking expressions of interest for the 2010-2011 Nominating Committee (NomCom) Chair.

Accountability & Transparency Review – Community Feedback

9 July 2010 | Per its Brussels statement, the Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT) now opens a public forum that will enable 'the Community to provide inputs and suggestions at any point during the ATRT review'.

ICANN Signs Accountability Framework with ccTLD Manager for Ecuador (.EC)

6 July 2010 | ICANN has announced that it has signed an Accountability Framework with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .EC (Ecuador), NIC.EC (NICEC) S.A, on 23 June 2010.

ICANN Signed Accountability Framework with .AN

6 July 2010 | ICANN has announced that it has signed an Accountability Framework with the country code top level domain (ccTLD) manager for .AN (Netherlands Antilles),the Universiteit van de Nederlandse Antillen (UNA), on 23 June 2010.

Public Comment: Proposed Bylaws Amendment to Allow Remuneration of Board Chair

6 July 2010 | ICANN opened up a public comment forum on proposed Bylaws amendments to allow for remuneration of the Chair of the Board.

Your Input Requested: Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy Part B Initial Report

5 July 2010 | A public comment forum opened for a twenty-day period as prescribed by the ICANN by-laws. The IRTP Part B WG is looking for your input on the Initial Report and in particular on the preliminary conclusions and recommendations put forward in the report, including a proposed Expedited Transfer Reverse Policy.

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

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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."