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ICANN59, the second Policy Forum, is now taking place in Johannesburg. Join the sessions either in person or via remote participation, and be sure to use our ICANN59 Mobile App to stay up-to-date on all the latest information.

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Blog Posts

President’s Corner: Greetings from Johannesburg

Top 12 Things You Didn’t Know About South Africa

Welcome to the ICANN59 Policy Forum

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News and Announcements

Empowered Community Has Opportunity to Trigger Three Powers

Empowered Community

The ICANN Board adopted FY18 Operating Plans and Budgets. Under ICANN's post-IANA Stewardship Transition Bylaws, the Empowered Community has the power to consider and, if they choose, to reject these documents before they go into effect. Click the link to learn more.

Watch David Olive's Welcome Video

David Olive

David Olive, Senior VP, Policy Development Support and Managing Director of the Istanbul Office welcomes everyone who has come to be a part of the innovative and collaborative policy work at ICANN59. Olive stresses the value of people from diverse backgrounds coming together to face mutual challenges. Click on the link above to learn more.

Watch Pierre Dandjinou's Welcome Video to ICANN59

Pierre Dandijnou

Pierre Dandjinou, ICANN's VP, Global Stakeholder Engagement in Africa, welcomes you to Johannesburg, also called Egoli, the City of Gold. In this video blog, he stresses the importance of your contribution to the ICANN59 Policy Forum. To learn more, click the link above.

Support Diverse and Meaningful Engagement at ICANN

Gender Diversity and Participation Survey

Share your views by participating in our 10-minute gender diversity & participation survey. This survey is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Click on the link above to start filling out the survey. We appreciate your input!

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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."