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DAAR Activity Project: Now Providing Personalized Monthly Reports for ccTLDs

Chair’s Blog: The Year Ahead and a Preview of the January Workshop

Continuing Focus on Human Rights

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News and Announcements

Listen to a Recording of the ICANN's Board Open Session

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The ICANN Board of Directors held its first workshop of 2021. During its Open Session, the Board shared details of its progress on its 2021 Priorities. If you missed the Open Session, you can listen to a recording by clicking the title.

Changes Coming to Registry Reports on ICANN’s Open Data Platform

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Beginning on 15 March 2021, ICANN’s Open Data platform will become the permanent home of Registry Reports. With this change, these reports will no longer be available on https://icann.org as of 15 March 2021. ICANN org is providing this update to inform the community of these upcoming changes. Click the title to learn more.

ICANN70 Will Be Held as Virtual Community Forum

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The ICANN Board of Directors has made the decision to convene ICANN70 as a Virtual Public Meeting due to the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This meeting was initially planned to be held in Cancún, Mexico. The dates have been modified and the meeting is now scheduled to be held 22-25 March 2021. Click on the title to learn 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."