Skip to main content

Join Us!

Registration is open for the ICANN66 Annual General Meeting in Montréal, Canada. The Public Meeting will take place from 2-7 November 2019 at the Montréal Convention Centre (Palais des Congrès de Montréal). Look forward to seeing you at the Annual General in Montréal.

Register today

Quicklinks

Blog Posts

EPDP Team Makes Key Progress in Phase 2 Work

Open Call for Community Members to Join the new Middle East Strategy Working Group

The Board Leadership Slate

BROWSE ALL BLOG POSTS

News and Announcements

The Board Leadership Slate

Thumb new boards member microcontent 01 icannorg 492x279

The ICANN Board has selected Maarten Botterman as its next Chair and León Felipe Sánchez Ambia as Vice Chair. They will be seated after the formal election during ICANN66 in Montréal. Click the link above to read more in current Board Chair Cherine Chalaby’s blog.

Are You Interested in DNS Abuse Measurements?

Thumb dns abuse measurement01 icannorg 492x279 1 1

ICANN’s Office of the CTO (OCTO) launched a mailing list to facilitate discussions on Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) and any other Domain Name System (DNS) abuse related projects and research that ICANN org and community carry out. Join us and help us improve our tools, analysis and research projects!

View all

A note about our privacy policies and terms of service:

We have updated our privacy policies and certain website terms of service to provide greater transparency, promote simplification, and align with recent changes in privacy laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."