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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

An Update on ICANN's GDPR-Related Efforts

  |   By Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO

Congress Urges the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to Expedite Access to Domain Name Registration Information

  |   By Jamie Hedlund, Senior Vice President, Contractual Compliance & Consumer Safeguards; and Managing Director, Washington D.C. Office

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Announcements

Domain Name System Security Extensions Now Deployed in all Generic Top-Level Domains

  |   By ICANN

ICANN Org Comments on European Data Protection Board (EDPB) Recommendations 01/2020 on Measures That Supplement Transfer Tools to Ensure Compliance with the EU Level of Protection of Personal Data

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Happy Holidays from the ICANN Board

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Watch our holiday video message from the ICANN Board. ICANN President & CEO and ICANN Board Chair Maarten Botterman and the rest of the ICANN Board wish you a happy holidays.

We Want Your Feedback

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ICANN published its Draft FY22-26 Operating and Financial Plan and Draft FY22 Operating Plan and Budget for public comment. Two community webinars will be held in January 2021 to provide an overview of the draft plans. Please join us for one of the webinars to learn more. Click on the title to learn more.

ICANN Issues Breach Notice to Net 4 India Limited; Continues to Support Registrants

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ICANN Contractual Compliance issued a Notice of Breach of Net 4 India Limited’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) on 10 December 2020. ICANN organization has been taking action to protect registrants during insolvency proceedings involving the registrar. Click the link above to read more about the resources available to those 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."