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As part of the development of ICANN’s Five-Year Operating and Financial Plan for the Fiscal Years 2021 to 2025, ICANN org has published two draft documents for Public Comment.

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DNS and the Internet of Things: Opportunities, Risks, and Challenges

ICANN in the Middle East – A Glance at the Past Year

Accountability and Transparency Review: Highlights from Marrakech and Share Your Views

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News and Announcements

Post-ICANN65 Policy Report Published

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The Post-ICANN65 Policy Report has been published. The report is an overview of decisions and outcomes from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees in Marrakech and provides resources to enable sustained engagement on important issues. Learn more.

ICANN67 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

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ICANN is seeking a broad and diverse group of knowledgeable constituents to apply for the ICANN67 Fellowship Program. The meeting runs from 7-12 March 2020 in Cancun, Mexico. The application round is open through 18 August 2019, 23:59 UTC.

Register for ICANN66

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Registration is now available for the ICANN66 Annual General, to be held in Montréal from 2-7 November 2019.

DNS and the Internet of Things: Opportunities, Risks, and Challenges

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The ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) has recently published SAC105, a report on the interplay between the Domain Name System (DNS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is the first paper aimed at distilling the unique interactions between the DNS and the IoT. Learn more.

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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."