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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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Recognizing ICANN Community Contributions in 2020

2020 Hindsight After 20 Years

Enhancing the Effectiveness of ICANN’s Multistakeholder Model Moves into Implementation

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News and Announcements

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.

ICANN 2020 Nominating Committee Announces Leadership Selections

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The 2020 Nominating Committee announced the selections for seven leadership positions including the ICANN Board of Directors, Public Technical Identifiers Board of Directors, At-Large Advisory Committee, Country Code Names Supporting Organization Council, and Generic Names Supporting Organization Council. Click the title 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."