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ICANN67 Alert

The ICANN67 Community Forum scheduled for 7-12 March 2020 in Cancún, Mexico, will now move to remote participation. A modified ICANN67 remote meeting schedule will be released soon. Read the full announcement for more information.

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News and Announcements

ICANN67 Remote Participation

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Remote participation is an integral part of any ICANN Public Meeting, but it will be vastly expanded for the ICANN67 Community Forum, and will leverage the robust technology platform in use by the community today. To learn more about remote participation, click the link above.

Improving the Public Comment Feature: An Information Transparency Initiative Update

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The ITI team has implemented improved search for Public Comment pages and we’d like your feedback on the enhancements. New features include: keyword search and filters (category and date) of Closed Proceedings, more easily accessible recently published Submissions and Reports, guided Submission forms, and the ability to search Submissions.

ICANN org CEO Report Now Available

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The latest ICANN org CEO report to the Board is now available. This report summarizes each function’s highlights, milestones, and provides an overview of recent activity. Click on the headline above to read more.

Application Deadline Extended for ICANN and PTI Leadership Positions

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The application deadline for ICANN and Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) leadership positions has been extended to Tuesday, 25 February 2020 at 23:59 UTC. Selected individuals will have a unique opportunity to work with accomplished colleagues from around the globe to help shape the the Internet's technical coordination and policy development.

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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."