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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

EU Initiatives Relevant to the DNS and DNS Service Providers: Feedback Period Still Open

  |   By Elena Plexida, Vice President, IGO & Government Engagement

Chair’s Blog: Recap of the January Remote Board Workshop

  |   By Maarten Botterman, Chair, ICANN Board of Directors

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Announcements

Initial Report on the Third ccNSO Policy Development Process (ccPDP3): Retirement of ccTLDs

  |   By ICANN

Proposal for Korean Root Zone‬ Label Generation Rules - Second Public Comment

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

ICANN70 Prep Week Schedule Now Available

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ICANN has published the ICANN70 Prep Week schedule to help the community for the upcoming ICANN70 Virtual Community Forum, which will be held 22-25 March 2021. Prep Week will consist of 10 sessions from 8-11 March 2021. To attend any sessions, please register for ICANN70. Click the title above to learn more.

ICANN72 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

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ICANN is seeking a broad and diverse group of knowledgeable constituents to apply for the ICANN72 Fellowship Program. The meeting runs from 23-28 October 2021 in Seattle, USA. The application round is open through 30 March 2021, 23:59 UTC. Click the title above to learn more.

SSR2 Final Report Public Comment Extended

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The Public Comment period for the second Security, Stability, and Resiliency (SSR2) Review Team Final Report has been extended until 8 April. Click the title above to view the final report that was submitted to the ICANN Board and provide feedback.

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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."