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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

ICANN69 Update: Improving Your Meeting Experience

  |   By Ashwin Rangan, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer

Chair’s Blog: September Virtual Board Workshop

  |   By Maarten Botterman, Chair, ICANN Board of Directors

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Announcements

IANA Naming Function Review Team Community Webinar

  |   By ICANN

Naela Sarras Appointed ICANN Vice President of Stakeholder Engagement in North America

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Improving Your ICANN69 Experience

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ICANN69 will launch a pilot effort to live stream select high interest sessions via YouTube. The new option delivers a broader global reach and a lower bandwidth option for attendees, providing a more inclusive meeting experience. Click the title above to learn more about this new feature and other meeting enhancements.

ICANN Extends Coronavirus-Related Travel and Meetings Guidance

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After careful consideration and collaboration with the Board and Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee (SO/AC) leadership, we have extended the suspension of face-to-face meetings and business travel until 31 December 2020. Click on the title to read the blog.

ICANN org Responds to DSA Public Consultation

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ICANN org responded to the European Commission’s public consultation on the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA is a legislative initiative launched in response to growing concern over the roles and responsibilities of online platforms. Click the title to read the announcement.

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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."