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ICANN65 Now Underway

The ICANN65 Policy Forum is in progress in Marrakech, Morocco. View the schedule and start planning. Download our ICANN Meetings mobile app now available in the app stores.

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Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Morocco

Automated Transcripts from Zoom at ICANN65

Marhaba, Bienvenue, and Welcome to Marrakech!

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News and Announcements

Kurt Pritz Receives 2019 Multistakeholder Ethos Award

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Kurt Pritz was announced as the recipient of the 2019 Multistakeholder Ethos Award at ICANN65 in Marrakech. The selection panel of representatives from Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees recognized Pritz's dedication to ICANN's multistakeholder model and his ability to achieve consensus. Click the link above for the full announcement.

Multistakeholder Policy Development

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The ICANN Policy Development Support Team facilitates bottom-up, consensus-driven processes for global gTLD, ccTLD, and IP address policies. Click the link above to learn more about multistakeholder policy development.

ICANN Publishes Results of Five-Year NextGen@ICANN Survey

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As part of the program's five-year anniversary, the survey was sent to former participants to determine the program's impact on their academic and professional lives and engagement with ICANN, as well as to collect feedback on ways to increase participation and improve the program. Learn more.

ICANN Launches New Registration System

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ICANN is launching a new registration platform for ICANN Meetings and Events. If you have registered in the past you will receive an email to opt in. Click 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."