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News and Announcements

Mandy Carver Named SVP, Government & IGO Engagement Team

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Mandy Carver has been appointed to the position of Senior Vice President, Government & Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) Engagement. Carver, whose 30 years of experience includes 13 years of global engagement work at ICANN, is a seasoned international consensus-builder with deep roots in multistakeholder processes. Click above for more details.

ICANN66 By the Numbers Report Now Available

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The ICANN66 By the Numbers Report is now available. Get information about 2016-2019 trends, key session statistics, and more. Click the link above to read the full report.

ICANN Publishes Updated Domain Name Marketplace Indicators

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Updated industry metrics are now available as part of the Domain Name Marketplace Indicators initiative. These statistics help track progress against ICANN's goal of supporting a robust, stable, and trusted domain name marketplace. Click the link above to view the metrics.

ICANN Announces NextGen@ICANN67 Participants

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ICANN has announced the individuals selected to participate in the NextGen Program at ICANN67 in Cancún, Mexico from 7-12 March 2020. The 12 individuals all attend Latin American universities and are engaged in studies in law, social communications, and international affairs.

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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."