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Missed the meeting or want to catch up on sessions you didn’t get to attend? Go to the ICANN59 meeting site to browse the schedule, view transcripts, watch video recordings, listen to audio recordings and more.

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Blog Posts

An Update from the Second Security, Stability and Resiliency of the Domain Name System (DNS) Review Team (SSR2)

New gTLDs – Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Team: ICANN59 Update and Next Steps

Evolving Data Privacy and Protection Regulations - UPDATE

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News and Announcements

Register for ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi

ICANN60 | Abu Dhabi

ICANN60 is our Annual General Meeting. It will take place from 28 October through 3 November. These meetings are a great opportunity for face-to-face discussions. If you are unable to travel to Abu Dhabi, we offer remote participation options. Click on the link above to register.

Africa DNS Forum Comes to Tanzania

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ICANN is organizing the fifth Africa Domain Name System (DNS) Forum in partnership with ISOC and AfTLD. The forum, to be hosted by the Tanzania Network Information Centre (tzNIC), will take place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 26-28 July 2017. Click the link above to learn more.

Post-ICANN59 Policy Report Now Available

Post-ICANN59 Policy Report

This Post-ICANN59 Policy Report captures outcomes and decisions as well as overviews of activities in Johannesburg. Representatives from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees organized the program. We appreciate your contributions that lead to a successful ICANN59 Policy Forum. Click the link above to read the report.

ICANN59 Johannesburg GAC Communiqué

GAC communiqué

The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) meeting at ICANN59 in Johannesburg, South Africa has issued its Johannesburg Communiqué. During ICANN59 62 GAC Members and 6 Observers attended the meeting. Click on the link above to review.

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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."