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Registration is open for the ICANN63 Annual General in Barcelona, Spain. The Public Meeting will take place from 20-25 October 2018 at the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB). Look forward to seeing you at the Annual General in Barcelona.

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Blog Posts

Data Protection/Privacy Update: Additional Guidance from the European Data Protection Board

Chair’s Blog: ICANN62 Meeting & Board Workshop

FY19 Community Regional Outreach Program (CROP) Ready for Use by Eligible ICANN Communities

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News and Announcements

Data Protection/Privacy Update: Additional GDPR Guidance from the EDPB

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Read the latest blog from John Jeffrey, ICANN General Counsel and Secretary where he highlights key points from a letter received from the European Data Protection Board (EDPR) and shares possible options for incorporating this guidance into WHOIS. The blog also provides answers to open questions in the Temporary Specification.

Office of the CTO Activities Brief: January to June 2018

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The first half of 2018 has been busy for the ICANN organization's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) team. They have been involved in endeavors around the globe to increase engagement with peers and partners and improve knowledge of the Internet's system of unique identifiers per ICANN's mission.

Looking Ahead to ICANN63 in Barcelona

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The ICANN63 Annual General Meeting will return to Europe to the wonderful city of Barcelona from 20–25 October. This year's meeting is particularly important, as the first two days will coincide with the High-Level Government Meeting (HLGM) hosted by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

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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."