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ICANN54 Dublin hotel booking links are now open! ICANN54 will be held 18-22 October 2015 in Dublin, Ireland at the Convention Centre Dublin (CCD). ICANN group hotel rates and more information about travel and visa requirements will be available through the ICANN54 Meeting website.

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Blog Posts

Volume 8: An Update on IANA Stewardship Discussions

  |   By Samantha Dickinson

New Domains – New Business Prospects

  |   By Michael Yakushev, ICANN's Vice President, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Additional Coordination Through New Transition Facilitation Calls

  |   By Theresa Swinehart

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News and Announcements

ICANN CEO Search Committee Announces CEO Candidate Criteria

ICANN Logo - Deadline for CEO Application Submissions: 20 Sept 2015

Learn the criteria and characteristics the ICANN CEO Search Committee is looking for in CEO Candidate applicants. All applications must be submitted by the 20 September 2015 deadline. Find out more about how to submit an application by clicking the link above.

Register now for ICANN's FY15 Q4 Stakeholder Call on 20 August

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At the ICANN53 Opening Ceremony, you heard ICANN’s Fadi Chehadé speak about the Planning System & how ICANN regularly reports against its strategic & operating plans. Please join us for the next Quarterly Stakeholder Call, 20 August at 1400 UTC to learn about activities for the quarter ending 30 June. Click the headline above to Register.

GNSO Review Wants Your Input!

ICANN GNSO wants your feedback

It’s your turn to comment on the independent review of the GNSO, the policy-making body for generic Top-Level Domains. Don’t have time to review the entire draft report? Read the short Report Summary and provide comment on any or all of the 36 recommendations. Your feedback could become part of the final report!

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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."