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By the Numbers & Survey Report

This report contains information about participation by ICANN67 session, location, and much more. It also includes results of the ICANN67 Survey, which focused on what worked best about our first virtual meeting and what areas can be improved.

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Keeping the DNS Secure During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Executive Team Announcement

Becoming UA-Ready – ICANN Update

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News and Announcements

ICANN Publishes EU Policy Update Paper

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ICANN has published the first in a series of papers that will provide European Union (EU) policy updates and analysis on topics, initiatives, and proposed legislation of potential relevance to the ICANN community and to ICANN’s technical role in the Internet ecosystem. Click the title to read the first paper.

New ICANN Learn Course for Registrants Now Available

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The Registrant Basics: Essentials for Domain Name Holders course aims to educate registrants and the end user community on registrant’s rights and responsibilities and their role in the domain name ecosystem. Also covered are ICANN policies that impact registrants, particularly when registering and managing domain names. Sign up and learn more!

Call for Expressions of Interest

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ICANN has opened a Call for Expressions of Interest for Panelists to serve on the omnibus Standing Panel for ICANN’s Independent Review Process (IRP). The deadline to submit Expressions of Interest is 31 July 2020 at 23:59 UTC. Click the title to learn more.

ICANN Events Cancelled

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The GDD Industry Summit and ICANN DNS Symposium scheduled for early May 2020, in Paris, France, have been cancelled due to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak. Click on the link above for more information.

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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."