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Welcome to the Global Community!

Welcome to the global community! ICANN is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet's unique identifiers. Through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.

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Blogs Posts

Chair’s Blog: A Preview of the Marrakech Board Workshop

  |   By Cherine Chalaby, Chair, ICANN Board of Directors

ICANN to Launch a Pilot Childcare Grants Program for its Community

  |   By Sally Costerton, Sr. Advisor to the President & SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement

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Announcements

Draft Final Report of The Second Country Code Names Supporting Organization Review (ccNSO2)

  |   By ICANN

ICANN Extends Call for Expressions of Interest for 2020 Nominating Committee Chair and Chair-Elect through 5 July 2019

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

GNSO Policy Briefing

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Read the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Briefing ICANN65 Edition and learn about the important work by the GNSO taking place at the ICANN65 Policy Forum. This report provides you with helpful links about the GNSO and background information on relevant GNSO policy efforts.

Pre-ICANN65 Policy Report Now Available

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The Pre-ICANN65 Policy Report provides a high-level overview of the planned work and activities of the ICANN Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) in Marrakech.

ICANN Publishes Results of Five-Year NextGen@ICANN Survey

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As part of the program's five-year anniversary, the survey was sent to former participants to determine the program's impact on their academic and professional lives and engagement with ICANN, as well as to collect feedback on ways to increase participation and improve the program. Learn more.

ICANN Launches New Registration System

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ICANN is launching a new registration platform for ICANN Meetings and Events. If you have registered in the past you will receive an email to opt in. Click the link above for more information.

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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."