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ICANN55 Marrakech hotel booking links are now open! ICANN55 will be held 5-10 March 2016 in Marrakech, Morocco at the Palmeraie Conference Center. ICANN group hotel rates and more information about travel and visa requirements are available through the ICANN Meeting website.

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Blog Posts

What is a Man in the Middle Attack?

  |   By Dave Piscitello | VP Of Security and ICT Coordinator

Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability ICANN54 co-Chairs' Statement

  |   By CCWG-Accountability co-Chairs

COUNTDOWN TO ICANN 55: From Dublin to Marrakech

  |   By Pierre Dandjinou

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News and Announcements

Experts Wanted for New gTLD Program Review

Apply Today written on Chalkboard with Stopwatch for 'O' in Today

ICANN's seeking experts in consumer protections, economics & security to help examine the affects of new gTLDs on the domain name industry & the Internet’s root zone. Members of this pioneering group will represent the broader community & their analysis will impact future rounds of the New gTLD Program. Applications are due 13 November 2015.

What’s the New ICANN Meeting Strategy?

New Meeting Strategy Image

Explore this infographic which explains the new ICANN Meetings Strategy for 2016. And don’t forget to attend the New Meeting Strategy Update in Dublin on Thursday, 22 October at 0900.

RAA Insurance Waiver Levels Playing Field

ICANN for Business Video Screenshot

The ICANN Board recently removed a barrier to registrar accreditation by waiving the requirement for Commercial General Liability insurance. The move is expected to benefit registrars in parts of South America and Africa, in particular, where Commercial General Liability insurance is difficult to find - if available at all - and very costly.

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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."