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ICANN69 Look Back

Missed the Community Days or Plenary Week and want to catch up on sessions you didn’t get to attend? Go to the ICANN69 meeting site to browse the schedule, view transcripts, watch video recordings, listen to audio recordings, and more.

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ICANN at the 15th Internet Governance Forum

Thank You for a Successful ICANN69

Recognizing ICANN Community Contributions in 2020

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News and Announcements

Read the ICANN FY20 Annual Report

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The ICANN Board published its FY20 Annual Report for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2020. This report documents Board, community, and org activities for the year, and our progress on ICANN’s objectives from the FY16-20 Strategic Plan. Click the title to read the report.

ICANN and PTI Release Audited Financial Statements for FY20

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ICANN and PTI published audited financial statements for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2020. The financial statements are accompanied by a report from BDO LLP, ICANN’s and PTI’s independent auditors, indicating that the audit did not identify any issues. Click the title to access the statements.

ICANN69 GAC Communiqué Now Available

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The ICANN69 Communiqué from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) is now available. The GAC provides advice to the ICANN Board on policy matters where there may be an interaction between ICANN’s policies and various laws, international agreements, and public policy objectives. To read the Communiqué and past GAC advice, click the title above.

Ramanou Biaou Honored with 2020 Dr. Tarek Kamel Award for Capacity Building

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ICANN announces the first recipient of the 2020 Dr. Tarek Kamel Award for Capacity Building. ICANN first introduced the award in January 2020 to honor members of the ICANN community who have contributed significantly to national, regional, or global capacity-development programs related to ICANN's mission. Click 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."