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Catch up on what’s happening across ICANN and get ready for ICANN57. Watch the recording of the FY16 Q4 Quarterly Stakeholder Call to get the latest information.

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Building A Class of Informed and Engaged Young Internet Leaders in Asia Pacific

  |   By Kelvin Wong, Head of Outreach and Public Responsibility, APAC

What Is an Internet Covert Channel?

  |   By Dave Piscitello, VP of Security

Creating the Services You Want

  |   By Chris Gift

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News and Announcements

David Conrad Discusses the 2nd SSR Review

David Conrad 2nd SSR Review

Watch ICANN's Chief Technology Officer David Conrad explain why reviews are important to ICANN and why you should apply for the 2nd Security, Stability and Resiliency (SSR) of the DNS Review Team. Deadline extended to 15 September. Be sure to submit your applications!

Successful NextGen applicants will participate at ICANN57

Successful NextGen applicants will participate at ICANN57

15 individuals from various universities in the Asian Pacific Region will participate with ICANN community members at the ICANN57 meeting in Hyderabad India. For more on the program and successful candidates, click on the link above.

Read the Post-ICANN56 Policy Forum Report

Post ICANN56 Report

Review highlights from ICANN56 in our Post-ICANN56 Policy Forum Report now available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. This report captures summaries of the cross-community sessions and updates from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. Click the link above to read the full Report.

Milestone Reached

NTIA Milestone

ICANN's Board Chair, Steve Crocker, reacts to U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) report on the IANA Stewardship Transition proposal. Click the link above to read the blog post.

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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."