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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 June 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Draft Final Report of Recommendations for IDN ccTLD Fast Track Mechanism Made Available

13 June 2008

Draft Independent Review of the At-Large Advisory Committee Posted for Discussion

13 June 2008

ICANN Solicits Public Comment on Single Character Name Allocation Framework

13 June 2008 | In response to community comment and interest, ICANN has developed a proposed allocation framework and use of funds from the allocation of single-character second-level domain names in existing gTLDs.

Update on 2008 ICANN Nominating Committee

13 June 2008 | Final selections will be confirmed six weeks after the ICANN Paris meeting. Following the selection of candidates, the Nom Com will conduct due diligence. The selections will be announced by early September 2008.

ICANN Launches Subscription-Based Policy Update

11 June 2008 | ICANN announced the launch of a new subscription-based ICANN Policy Update that will highlight on a monthly basis key Internet policy issues being addressed by its bottom-up, consensus-based policy development structure.

Consultation on Proposals to Reform ICANN Meetings

9 June 2008 | At its meeting on May 29, 2008 the Board agreed to the release of a paper on the reform of ICANN meetings that has been prepared by staff. The paper asks the community to consider changes to the number of meetings that ICANN holds and the location.

ICANN in the News

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

Dot-What? Will_This_Name_Happen.nyc? (The New York Times)

9 June 2008 | A grass-roots group is trying to build support for a .nyc top-level domain when the naming policies for Internet Web sites are expanded.

Upcoming Events

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

Proposed FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 476 KB]

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."