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Next Steps for ICANN Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment

Returning to Marrakech: Looking Ahead to ICANN65

Independent Review Process Standing Panel – Call to Action

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News and Announcements

Take the Age Diversity and Participation Survey

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ICANN has launched a survey to determine current perceptions of age diversity in the ICANN community. The survey is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Everyone is encouraged to share their views. The survey closes on 19 April 2019 at 23:59 UTC.

ICANN64 Kobe GAC Communiqué

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The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) meeting at ICANN64 has issued its Kobe Communiqué and is now available for review.

ICANN66 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

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ICANN is seeking a broad and diverse group of knowledgeable constituents to apply for the ICANN66 Fellowship Program. The meeting runs from 2-7 November 2019 in Montreal, Canada. The application round is open through 11 April 2019, 23:59 UTC. 

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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."