Skip to main content

Join Us

The ICANN59 Policy Forum takes place at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26-29 June 2017. ICANN meetings are a great opportunity to participate in Internet policymaking. Register for ICANN59 today.

Click here to register

Quicklinks

Blog Posts

A Conversation with Members of the Second Security, Stability and Resiliency of the Domain Name System (DNS) Review Team (SSR2)

The DNSOP Working Group of the IETF Organizes Webinar to Raise Awareness of Special-Use Domain Names

A look back: The ICANN History Project

BROWSE ALL BLOG POSTS

News and Announcements

New Empowered Community Resources

Empowered Community

ICANN launched three new resources for the Empowered Community – a primary Empowered Community landing page, an Empowered Community Administration page and a page to house correspondence related to the Empowered Community. Click the link above for more information.

Application for APIGA 2017 Is Now Open

Image

ICANN is looking for aspiring leaders between the ages of 18 and 35 from the Asia Pacific region to apply for the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy (APIGA). This workshop takes place from 7-11 August in Korea and focuses on topics related to ICANN and Internet governance. The deadline is 8 June. Click the link above to apply.

ICANN Day at the Africa Internet Summit

ICANN Day

ICANN is sponsoring and participating in the Africa Internet Summit on 21 May-2 June in Nairobi, Kenya. This is the third time ICANN Day will be held during the summit, aiming to raise awareness of ICANN's role in the Internet Governance ecosystem and foster ICANN's outreach in Africa. Click the link above to learn more.

Get to Know ICANN

What Does ICANN Do?

Need an introduction to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)? Read through our new infographic to learn some of the basic information about ICANN including what we do, why you should participate and how to get involved and informed. Click on the link above to learn more about ICANN.

View all
Home groups
ICANN Groups

We depend on the support of many different types of groups and sub-structures: Advisory Commitees, Supporting Organizations, standingcommittees, working groups, review teams, task forces, and more.

Explore all Groups

A note about tracking cookies:

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. If you would like to read more about the use of cookies, click here

This notice is intended to appear only the first time you visit the site on any computer.OK

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."