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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

Next Steps for the Technical Study Group & EPDP

  |   By Göran Marby, ICANN President & CEO

Transitioning ICANN's Remote Participation Platform to Zoom

  |   By Ashwin Rangan, SVP Engineering & Chief Information Officer

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Announcements

ICANN Publishes Updated Domain Name Marketplace Indicators

  |   By ICANN

Invitation: Name Collision Analysis Project (NCAP) Discussion Group

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Register Now for ICANN65!

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Registration is now open for the ICANN65 Policy Forum in Marrakech, Morocco. The Policy Forum from 24-27 June will give the global Internet community a chance to focus on policy development. This will be the twelfth ICANN Public Meeting held in Africa, and the third in Marrakech, Morocco.

ICANN Publishes Updated Domain Name Marketplace Indicators

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ICANN has announced publication of the first wave of the Domain Name Marketplace Indicators report, which presents statistics related to generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). View the report now.

Next Steps for the Technical Study Group & EPDP

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Learn more about next steps for the Technical Study Group & Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). The EPDP team is now transitioning into Phase 2 of its work, which will include a standard access mechanism for non-public gTLD registration data and issues in the Annex to the Temporary Specification.

NextGen@ICANN Application Round for ICANN66 Is Now Open

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The application round for those interested in participating at the ICANN66 Meeting in Montréal, Canada, through the NextGen Program has launched. The Meeting will take place from 2 November to 7 November 2019. The application round will remain opened until 10 May 2019. Successful candidates will be announced on the ICANN website on 12 July 2019.

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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."