Skip to main content

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.

Quicklinks

Blogs Posts

Important Changes Coming to The Way You Use Adobe Connect

  |   By Ashwin Rangan, ICANN SVP Engineering and CIO

Outreach & Engagement Leading into ICANN62

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

Browse All Blog Posts


Announcements

ICANN Publishes Updated gTLD Marketplace Health Index

  |   By ICANN

ICANN Announces Calls-to-Action for Community Participation in ICANN Reviews

  |   By ICANN

Browse All Announcements

News And Announcements

Data Protection/Privacy Update: Seeking Community Feedback

Thumb gdpr 61418 feature

Read the latest blog from Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO, on the proposed unified access model where we are seeking community feedback. As part of this discussion, we’re sharing the draft framework elements for a model that provides for continued access to full WHOIS data.

The Sixth Africa DNS Forum to take place in Cotonou, Benin

Thumb sm template 10 icannorg 492x279

On 3-5 July, the sixth Africa DNS Forum will take place under the theme “Building a Sustainable Domain Name Industry in Africa” in Cotonou, Benin. The Forum is co-organized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Africa Top Level Domains Organization (AfTLD), and AfRegistrar.

Fourth Annual 2018 GDD Industry Summit Recap

Thumb gdd industry summit recap 1557x881 12jun18 en

The Global Domains Division (GDD) of the ICANN organization held its fourth annual Industry Summit in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. This year's Summit comprised of 410 attendees from over 32 countries, with dozens more participating remotely.

GNSO Policy Briefing

Thumb gnso feature 01

Read the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Briefing ICANN62 Edition and learn about the important work by the GNSO taking place at the ICANN62 Policy Forum in Panama City, Panama from 25-28 June. This report provides you with helpful links about the GNSO and background information on relevant GNSO policy efforts.

View All

A note about our privacy policies and terms of service:

We have updated our privacy policies and certain website terms of service to provide greater transparency, promote simplification, and align with recent changes in privacy laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."