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ICANN62

The ICANN62 Policy Forum is underway in Panama City, Panama. View the schedule and start planning. Download our ICANN62 mobile app now available in the app stores.

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Community Onboarding Pilot Program ICANN62 Update

Greetings from Panama City

Welcome to ICANN62!

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News and Announcements

Data Protection/Privacy Update

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ICANN was informed the Regional Court in Bonn, Germany, decided to revisit its ruling in the injunction proceedings that ICANN initiated against EPAG, a Germany-based, ICANN-accredited registrar that is part of the Tucows Group. Now, the German Regional Court will revisit the ruling in injunction proceedings on the request to preserve WHOIS data.

GNSO Policy Briefing

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Read the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Briefing ICANN62 Edition and learn about the important work by the GNSO taking place at the ICANN62 Policy Forum in Panama City, Panama from 25-28 June. This report provides you with helpful links about the GNSO and background information on relevant GNSO policy efforts.

How the ITI Technical Infrastructure Works

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There is a lot of behind-the-curtain engineering effort going into the Information Transparency Initiative (ITI). Ashwin Rangan, ICANN's CIO, gives you a peek behind that technical curtain to give you a better understanding of the planning and implementation that is going into ITI.

The Sixth Africa DNS Forum to take place in Cotonou, Benin

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On 3-5 July, the sixth Africa DNS Forum will take place under the theme “Building a Sustainable Domain Name Industry in Africa” in Cotonou, Benin. The Forum is co-organized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Africa Top Level Domains Organization (AfTLD), and AfRegistrar.

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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."