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ICANN60 is our Annual General Meeting. It will take place from 28 October through 3 November. These meetings are a great opportunity for face-to-face discussions. If you are unable to travel to Abu Dhabi, we offer remote participation options.

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ICANN Middle East – One Year in Review

Taking APAC Space to the Next Level

The Africa DNS Forum Turns Five

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News and Announcements

New ccNSO Introductory Course Available on ICANN Learn

ccNSO: what it is and how it works?

Enroll in this introductory Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) course on ICANN Learn. This course shares how ccNSO came to be, the role it has in the vast ICANN ecosystem, how it is structured, and how to join. Practice what you learned through quizzes, and find additional links and resources. Click the link above to enroll today.  

ICANN61 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

ICANN61 Fellowship Application Round

ICANN is seeking a broad and diverse group of knowledgeable constituents to apply for the ICANN61 Fellowship Program. The Public Meeting takes place from 10–15 March 2018 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The deadline to apply is 15 September 2017. Click above to learn more.

15 NextGen Participants to Attend ICANN60

Meet the NextGen Participants Joining Us at #ICANN60

15 individuals from various universities in the Asian Pacific Region have been selected to participate and engage with ICANN Community Members at the ICANN60 Meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. For more on the program and successful candidates, click on the link above.

Post-ICANN59 Policy Report Now Available

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This Post-ICANN59 Policy Report captures outcomes and decisions as well as overviews of activities in Johannesburg. Representatives from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees organized the program. We appreciate your contributions that lead to a successful ICANN59 Policy Forum. Click the link above to read the report.

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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."