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Chair's Blog: ICANN63 Meeting & Board Workshop

SSR2 Review Team: Seven Highlights from Our Meeting at ICANN63

Contractual Compliance: Addressing Domain Name System (DNS) Infrastructure Abuse

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News and Announcements

Post-ICANN63 Policy Report Now Available

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The Post-ICANN63 Policy Report captures updates from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. The ICANN community develops and refines policies that ensure the security, stability, and resiliency of the global Internet. More than 200 sessions at ICANN63 were dedicated to community policy and advice development.

ICANN Announces Successful Candidates for ICANN64 Fellowship Program

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ICANN is pleased to welcome 45 individuals from 36 countries selected to participate in ICANN's Fellowship program at the 64th ICANN Public Meeting in Kobe, Japan. These successful candidates represent all sectors of society including: civil, government, ccTLD operations, academia, business community, technical, security, and end-user groups.

The Recent KSK Rollover: Summary and Next Steps

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The main cryptographic key for the DNS root zone was changed on 11 October 2018 and the result was exceptionally good: There were far fewer Internet users negatively affected by the change (called a rollover) than anyone expected. There are a few more things that need to be done for the rollover process to be considered complete. Learn more.

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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."