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The Middle East DNS Forum Turns Five

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ICANN is organizing the fifth Middle East DNS Forum on 25 and 26 April in Ankara, Turkey. The event is hosted by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority of Turkey. Click the headline to learn more.

Supporting Community Policy and Advice Work – A Few Key Indicators

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The Post-ICANN61 Policy Report is now available. It captures decisions and outcomes from the work of the three Supporting Organizations (SOs) and four Advisory Committees (ACs) at the San Juan meeting this past March. The report also looks ahead and suggests additional resources to enable sustained community engagement on important issues.

ICANN Announces Participants NextGen@ICANN62

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The 15 individuals announced are currently engaged in studies in Latin American universities in the fields of computer science, law, and human rights. In addition, five individuals who attended a previous ICANN public meeting with the NextGen program will now serve as ambassadors for these newcomers. Click the link above 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."