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Blog Posts

Working Toward a More Secure Domain Name System (DNS) Ecosystem

2020 Nominating Committee (NomCom): An Update on the Selection Process

An Update on the Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice (CCT) Review

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News and Announcements

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Technical Analysis

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This new OCTO Publication takes a deep dive into RKPI, its operational environment and practice to understand the current state of its deployment, and identify areas of potential risk, challenges, and opportunity of improvement. Click on the title above to learn more.

2020 Nominating Committee (NomCom): An Update on the Selection Process

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Due to the pandemic challenges, the 2020 NomCom has revised the selection process timeline. The 2020 NomCom continues its Phase Four work and are working closely with the ICANN Board and organization (org) to ensure they can continue their work in these challenging times. Click the title above to learn more.

ICANN President & CEO Update on Progress of Organizational Changes

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ICANN’s President & CEO Göran Marby provides an update on progress that has been in made in formalizing organizational changes intended to help support the ICANN community by improving efficiencies, strengthening collaboration, and maximizing resources. Click on the title above to 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."