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Blog Posts

The Information Transparency Initiative (ITI): Making Improvements by Building Strong Foundations

Final Proposed FY19 Operating Plan and Budget

Chair's Blog: Approving the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data and Next Steps

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News and Announcements

NextGen@ICANN Application Round for ICANN63 Is Now Open

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The application round is now open for those interested in participating at the ICANN63 meeting in Barcelona through the NextGen@ICANN Program. This Meeting will take place from 20–26 October 2018. The application round will remain open until 22 June 2018.

ICANN org's Open Data Strategy

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Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO, has made it one of his personal goals to see the ICANN org deliver open data to the ICANN community. Click the link above to learn more.

Public Comments on Timing of ICANN Reviews

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Read the latest blog from Theresa Swinehart, ICANN SVP, Multistakeholder Strategy and Strategic Initiatives (MSSI), about the publishing of Public Comments on the Timeline of ICANN Reviews.

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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."