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ICANN60 is our Annual General Meeting. It will take place from 28 October through 3 November. These meetings are a great opportunity for face-to-face discussions. If you are unable to travel to Abu Dhabi, we offer remote participation options.

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Nominations for ARIN Elections Now Open

Personal Data “Use” Matrix Now Available for Public Review

Meet the NextGen from ICANN59

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News and Announcements

Successful Candidates Announced for ICANN60 Fellowship

ICANN60 Fellowship Candidates Announced

ICANN selects 60 individuals from 50 countries to participate in our Fellowship program at ICANN60 from 28 October-3 November 2017. These successful candidates represent all sectors of society including; civil, government, ccTLD operations, academia, business community, technical, security, and end user groups. Meet the ICANN60 candidates.

Review the ICANN59 Community Feedback and By the Numbers Reports

ICANN59 Reports Now Available

ICANN published the results of the ICANN59 participant survey, and the technical, demographic, and attendance statistics. There are two reports – the Community Feedback report and the By the Numbers report. These reports are part of ICANN's commitment to transparency. Click on the link above to review these reports.

Africa DNS Forum Comes to Tanzania

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ICANN is organizing the fifth Africa Domain Name System (DNS) Forum in partnership with ISOC and AfTLD. The forum, to be hosted by the Tanzania Network Information Centre (tzNIC), will take place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 26-28 July 2017. Click the link above to learn more.

Post-ICANN59 Policy Report Now Available

Post-ICANN59 Policy Report

This Post-ICANN59 Policy Report captures outcomes and decisions as well as overviews of activities in Johannesburg. Representatives from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees organized the program. We appreciate your contributions that lead to a successful ICANN59 Policy Forum. Click the link above to read the report.

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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."