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The ICANN59 Policy Forum takes place at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26-29 June 2017. ICANN meetings are a great opportunity to participate in Internet policymaking. Register for ICANN59 today.

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Blog Posts

The DNSOP Working Group of the IETF Organizes Webinar to Raise Awareness of Special-Use Domain Names

A look back: The ICANN History Project

Clarifying the Roles of the ICANN Complaints Office and Ombudsman

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News and Announcements

NextGen@ICANN Application Round Opens for ICANN60

ICANN60

ICANN has launched the NextGen program application round for those interested in participating at ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi. This round remains open until 23 June 2017. Successful candidates will be announced on the ICANN website, 24 July 2017. Click on the link above for more information.

Explore the 2016 LAC Year in Review

Year in Review

Take the time to read about our 2016 activities in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) by downloading this comprehensive report created by the ICANN LAC regional team. The report includes LAC strategy updates and communications highlights. Click the link above to access the English, Portuguese and Spanish versions of the report.

Middle East DNS Forum in Egypt on 22-23 May

Cairo

ICANN, in partnership with the Internet Society, is organizing the fourth edition of the Middle East DNS Forum. This Forum is hosted by the National Telecom Regulatory Authority of Egypt and takes place on 22 and 23 May. The theme of the Forum is "Strengthening Digital Presence in the Middle East." Click the link above to learn more.

Get to Know ICANN

What Does ICANN Do?

Need an introduction to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)? Read through our new infographic to learn some of the basic information about ICANN including what we do, why you should participate and how to get involved and informed. Click on the link above to learn more about ICANN.

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We depend on the support of many different types of groups and sub-structures: Advisory Commitees, Supporting Organizations, standingcommittees, working groups, review teams, task forces, and 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."