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Registration is open for the ICANN65 Policy Forum Meeting in Marrakech, Morocco. The Public Meeting will take place from 24-27 June 2019 at Palmeraie Conference Center Marrakech. Look forward to seeing you at the Policy Forum in Marrakech.

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Blog Posts

Evolving the Governance of the Root Server System

Chair’s Blog: Wrapping up the Istanbul Workshop

ICANN to Participate in the Upcoming Africa Internet Summit

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News and Announcements

Application for APIGA 2019 Is Now Open

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ICANN is looking for aspiring leaders from the Asia Pacific region, between the ages of 18 and 35, to apply for the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy (APIGA). Taking place from 12 – 16 August in Seoul, Korea, the five-day workshop will focus on topics related to ICANN and Internet governance. Click the link above to apply.

Update on ICANN's Move to Zoom

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ICANN org is deploying Zoom as ICANN's official remote participation (RP) platform. We are on track to transition entirely to Zoom in time for ICANN65 in Marrakech, Morocco. 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."