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Registration is open for the ICANN61 Community Forum in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Public Meeting will take place from 10-15 March 2018 at the Centro de Convenciones de Puerto Rico. Look forward to seeing you at the Community Forum in San Juan.

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Blog Posts

Data Protection and Privacy Update – Plans for the New Year

Do You Have a Domain Name? Here's What You Need to Know.

A Look Back at Our Africa Engagement in 2017

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News and Announcements

ICANN61 NextGen Participants Announced

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Fifteen individuals from various universities in the North American region will participate with ICANN community members at ICANN61, to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from 10 to 15 March 2018. For more on the program and the selected candidates, click on the link above.

Ombudsman Annual Report Translations Now Available

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The Office of the Ombudsman Annual Report provides a consolidated analysis of the year’s complaints and resolutions as well as recommendations for steps that could minimize future complaints. The report is now available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Click the link above to access the report.

Recap on Data Protection and Privacy Activity

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ICANN’s Akram Atallah and Theresa Swinehart provide you with a recap on the dialogues that took place during ICANN60, recent developments, and what’s next in terms of the legal analysis. Click on the link above to learn more.

ICANN60 By the Numbers Reports Now Available

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The ICANN60 By the Numbers report summarizes our findings from ICANN's second Annual General Meeting of the new meeting strategy. This report is part of ICANN's commitment to transparency, which includes technical, demographic, and attendance statistics.

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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."