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Update on ICANN's Strategic Planning Process

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The community, Board, and the ICANN org have completed the process of identifying strategic outlook trends. The ICANN org has consolidated the results of the trend identification work and findings will be shared with the community in September via webinars.

ICANN 2018 Nominating Committee Announces Selections

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The ICANN 2018 Nominating Committee is pleased to announce its selections for eight leadership positions within ICANN. The Nominating Committee is charged with recruiting and selecting a portion of ICANN’s leadership and is mandated to ensure that ICANN’s overall leadership is diverse in geography, culture, skills, experience, and perspective.

Data Protection/Privacy Update: Key GDPR WHOIS Updates and Next Steps

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Read the latest blog from Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO, highlighting next steps for GDPR clarification and the proposed unified access model. Learn about continued access options to non-public registration data and be advised input is still needed on the Framework Elements for a Unified Access Model for Continued Access to Full WHOIS Data.

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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."