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ICANN64 | Kobe

Registration for ICANN64 – the first ICANN Public Meeting of 2019 – is now open. The Community Forum will be held in Kobe, Japan from 9-14 March 2019.

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Blog Posts

ICANN's Middle East and Africa Regional Office in Istanbul: Five Years and Counting

2019 Nominating Committee Priorities and Agenda

Global Stakeholder Engagement Launches Capacity Development Survey

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News and Announcements

Take the Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) Capacity Development Survey

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The Global Stakeholder Engagement team is requesting participation in a short survey that will help determine future engagement strategies that better serve the ICANN community. The survey will run from 8-22 January 2019, with the GSE team planning to publish the results and analysis in late February 2019. Learn more about the survey.

An Update on the IANA Naming Function Review (IFR)

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The IFR is one of the new accountability mechanisms created as part of the IANA stewardship transition to ensure that Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) meets the needs and expectations of its naming customers. Read the latest update on this important review.

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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."