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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

ICANN to Participate in the 2018 Africa Internet Summit (AIS)

  |   By Pierre Dandjinou, VP of Stakeholder Engagement in Africa

Data Protection/Privacy Issues Update: Summarizing our Recent Meeting with Article 29

  |   By Göran Marby, President and CEO, ICANN

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Announcements

ICANN Publishes Staff Report of Public Comments on ICANN's Draft FY19 Operating Plan and Budget

  |   By ICANN

SSAC2 Review Survey Available for Community Input

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Summarizing Today’s Meeting with the Article 29 Working Party

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Read the latest blog from Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO, on our ongoing discussions relating to the GDPR and today’s meeting in Brussels with the Article 29 Working Party Technology Subgroup and representatives of the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology and Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers.

The Middle East DNS Forum Turns Five

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ICANN is organizing the fifth Middle East DNS Forum on 25 and 26 April in Ankara, Turkey. The event is hosted by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority of Turkey. Click the headline to learn more.

Supporting Community Policy and Advice Work – A Few Key Indicators

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The Post-ICANN61 Policy Report is now available. It captures decisions and outcomes from the work of the three Supporting Organizations (SOs) and four Advisory Committees (ACs) at the San Juan meeting this past March. The report also looks ahead and suggests additional resources to enable sustained community engagement on important issues.

Application for APIGA 2018 Is Now Open

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ICANN is looking for aspiring leaders from the Asia Pacific region, between the ages of 18 and 35, to apply for the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy (APIGA). The five-day academy will focus on topics related to ICANN and Internet governance and takes place in Korea from 23 – 27 July 2018. Application window closes on 18 May.

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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."