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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

What ITHI Can Tell Us About Resolver Concentration

  |   By Gabriella Schittek, Senior Manager, Global Stakeholder Engagement and Alain Durand, Principal Technologist, Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO)

ICANN at the 15th Internet Governance Forum

  |   By Mandy Carver, Senior Vice President for Government and IGO Engagement

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Announcements

Recommendations for ICANN’s Root Name Service Strategy and Implementation

  |   By ICANN

The Fifth Eastern European DNS Forum Goes Virtual

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Read the ICANN FY20 Annual Report

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The ICANN Board published its FY20 Annual Report for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2020. This report documents Board, community, and org activities for the year, and our progress on ICANN’s objectives from the FY16-20 Strategic Plan. Click the title to read the report.

ICANN and PTI Release Audited Financial Statements for FY20

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ICANN and PTI published audited financial statements for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2020. The financial statements are accompanied by a report from BDO LLP, ICANN’s and PTI’s independent auditors, indicating that the audit did not identify any issues. Click the title to access the statements.

New OCTO Publication Provides a Technical Analysis of New IP

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This publication by the Office of the CTO provides a technical analysis of New IP, addressing the question of its compatibility with the current Internet Protocols and the potential challenges of its deployment. It also considers the New IP’s relationship to ITU-T Network 2030, two concepts often used interchangeably. Click above to learn more.

ICANN69 GAC Communiqué Now Available

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The ICANN69 Communiqué from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) is now available. The GAC provides advice to the ICANN Board on policy matters where there may be an interaction between ICANN’s policies and various laws, international agreements, and public policy objectives. To read the Communiqué and past GAC advice, click the title above.

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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."