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ICANN Takes DNS Discussions to the 14th Internet Governance Forum

Recognizing Our Community

A Blog About Leadership

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News and Announcements

Thank You Cherine Chalaby

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On behalf of the ICANN community, Board, and org, we extend our most sincere and heartfelt appreciation to Cherine Chalaby as he steps down from Chair of the ICANN Board. His leadership and his dedication will be greatly missed. Click the link above to read the blog by Maarten Botterman, ICANN Board Chair, and Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO.

ccTLDs Invited to Participate in DAAR

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The ICANN organization invites all ccTLD operators to participate in the Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) project to promote a greater understanding of Domain Name System (DNS) abuse across the global DNS. Click the link above to know more.

ICANN68 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

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The Fellowship Program application round is now open for the ICANN68 Policy Forum. This round is only open to candidates who have previously completed an ICANN Fellowship. ICANN68 will take place from 22 to 25 June 2020 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The deadline to apply is 15 December 2019, 23:59 UTC.

ITI Releases Board Meeting Content for Feedback

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The Information Transparency Initiative Team (ITI) released a new search experience for Board Meeting content for your feedback. The improvements include search filters by document type (Resolutions, Minutes, Agenda); date; and more. We need your input! Click the link above to submit your feedback. Reminder, the alpha site is in active development.

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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."