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As part of the development of ICANN’s Five-Year Operating and Financial Plan for the Fiscal Years 2021 to 2025, ICANN org has published two draft documents for Public Comment.

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ICANN in the Middle East – A Glance at the Past Year

Accountability and Transparency Review: Highlights from Marrakech and Share Your Views

Chair’s Blog: ICANN65 Meeting & Board Workshop

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News and Announcements

Post-ICANN65 Policy Report Published

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The Post-ICANN65 Policy Report has been published. The report is an overview of decisions and outcomes from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees in Marrakech and provides resources to enable sustained engagement on important issues. Learn more.

Register for ICANN66

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Registration is now available for the ICANN66 Annual General, to be held in Montréal from 2-7 November 2019.

ICANN Announces Participants NextGen@ICANN66

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ICANN has announced the names of the individuals who will participate in the NextGen program at ICANN66, to be held in Montréal, Canada, from 2 to 7 November 2019. The 12 individuals are currently engaged in studies in North American universities in the fields of computer science, law, and international security.

Operating Standards: Guiding ICANN’s Specific Reviews

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The ICANN Board adopted the Operating Standards for Specific Reviews at ICANN65 in Marrakech. The Operating Standards are mandated by ICANN's Bylaws and guide how current and future ICANN Specific Reviews are conducted.

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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."