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Find out the facts about ICANN, the IANA functions and the transition. For example: the United States Government doesn't control or oversee the global Internet.

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News from Identifier Technology Health Indicators (ITHI)

  |   By Alain Durand

From mitigation to integration: III LAC DNS Forum in Santo Domingo

  |   By Daniel Fink, Senior Stakeholder Engagement Manager for Brazil, ICANN

Update on Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review

  |   By Jonathan Zuck

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News and Announcements

Updated Expected Standards of Behaviors

Updated Expected Standards of Behavior

Learn the Updated Expected Standards of Behavior by reading through the infographic. Everyone who takes part in the ICANN multistakeholder process, including Board, staff and those involved in Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee councils should review this document by clicking the link above.

ICANN58 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

ICANN58 Apply Now

lCANN launches the application round for participants interested in the ICANN58 Public Meeting through the Fellowship Program. The meeting takes place from 11-16 March 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information about the program and how to apply, click the header above.

Uncover WHOIS Inaccuracy & Transfer Complaints

WHOIS Inaccuracy Complaint Transfer Complaint

The Contractual Compliance Team has two new infographics each available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. The Transfer Complaint infographic walks you through how to transfer a complaint. Discover how to file a WHOIS Inaccuracy Complaint in the second infographic. Click the link above to access both.

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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."