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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

Future Policy and Outreach Ambassadors to Attend the Third At-Large Summit (ATLAS III)

  |   By Heidi Ullrich, VP, Policy Development & At-Large Relations

A Blog about Friendship

  |   By Göran Marby

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Announcements

DRAFT PTI and IANA FY21 Operating Plan and Budgets

  |   By ICANN

Proposed Changes and new Additions to the IANA SLAs for ccTLD Creation and ccTLD Transfers

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

A Blog about Friendship

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Read ICANN President & CEO Göran Marby's blog about his friend Tarek Kamel and share your stories about Tarek in the comments section. Here's an excerpt from the blog: We have a Swedish saying for when someone you love passes away: He is missed in me. As you now know, our dear friend Tarek has passed away and he is missed in me.

Pre-ICANN66 Policy Report Now Available

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Get ready for ICANN66 with the Pre-ICANN66 Policy Report. The report provides a high-level overview of the planned work and activities of the ICANN Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) in Montréal from 2-7 November. Click the link above to read the report.

Zoom Security Update

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Zoom recently added new settings to increase security and ensure meeting privacy. These new settings will enforce a password on all new meetings scheduled after 29 September. At the recommendation of ICANN’s internal InfoSec team, these new settings will be enabled immediately. Click above for more detail on how you may be affected.

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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."