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ICANN60 will take place in Abu Dhabi from 28 October - 3 November 2017. View the schedule and start planning your days during the Annual General Meeting. Download our ICANN60 mobile app now available in the app stores.

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Blog Posts

The Global Domains Division at ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi: What to Expect

Enhancing Transparency in Contractual Compliance Reporting

The Digital Economy: The New Oil of the Middle East

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News and Announcements

Review the Pre-ICANN60 Policy Report

Pre-ICANN60 Policy Report

The Pre-ICANN60 Policy Report is written by the Policy Development Support team. This report provides high-level updates from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. Click the link above to start reading the report.

ICANN60 Policy Briefing Now Available

ICANN | GNSO Policy Briefing ICANN60 Edition

The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Briefing is produced by ICANN's policy staff supporting the GNSO. This is drafted specifically in preparation for ICANN meetings to provide the community with concise background information on all relevant GNSO policy efforts. Click on the link above to read the report.

Read Results of Gender Diversity Survey

Gender Diversity and Participation Survey Report

ICANN recently conducted a community-wide survey on gender diversity and participation. The report with survey findings is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Click the link above to explore data about perceptions of gender diversity, leadership, inclusiveness, and potential barriers to participation.  

Learn How ICANN Will Improve Our Content Findability

information transparency initiative

The ICANN Board approved the Information Transparency Initiative at its Montevideo meeting. The initiative's objective is to improve the findability of ICANN's public content in all six U.N. languages. Read more about the initiative and how it will help our stakeholders. Click the headline to read 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."