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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

Update on ICANN Public Meeting Innovation

  |   By Sally Costerton, Senior Vice President, Global Stakeholder Engagement and David Olive, Senior Vice President, Policy Development Support

Welcome 2021 from the ICANN Asia Pacific Office

  |   By Jia-Rong Low, Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director, Asia Pacific Office (APAC), ICANN

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Announcements

ICANN Org Launches Audit of Registrar Compliance with DNS Security Threat Obligations

  |   By ICANN

ICANN70 Will Be Held as Virtual Community Forum

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Changes Coming to Registry Reports on ICANN’s Open Data Platform

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Beginning on 15 March 2021, ICANN’s Open Data platform will become the permanent home of Registry Reports. With this change, these reports will no longer be available on https://icann.org as of 15 March 2021. ICANN org is providing this update to inform the community of these upcoming changes. Click 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."