Skip to main content

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.

Quicklinks

Blogs Posts

ICANN Takes DNS Discussions to the 14th Internet Governance Forum

  |   By Mandy Carver, Vice President for Government Engagement - Global Coordination

Recognizing Our Community

  |   By David Olive, Senior Vice President, Policy Development Support

Browse All Blog Posts


Announcements

Country Code Top-Level Domains Can Now Participate in ICANN’s Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) System

  |   By ICANN

ICANN68 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

  |   By ICANN

Browse All Announcements

News And Announcements

Thank You Cherine Chalaby

Thumb cherine feature 02

On behalf of the ICANN community, Board, and org, we extend our most sincere and heartfelt appreciation to Cherine Chalaby as he steps down from Chair of the ICANN Board. His leadership and his dedication will be greatly missed. Click the link above to read the blog by Maarten Botterman, ICANN Board Chair, and Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO.

ccTLDs Invited to Participate in DAAR

Thumb cctld dns abuse activity reporting daar 01 icannorg 492x279

The ICANN organization invites all ccTLD operators to participate in the Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) project to promote a greater understanding of Domain Name System (DNS) abuse across the global DNS. Click the link above to know more.

ICANN68 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

Thumb icnn68 492x279

The Fellowship Program application round is now open for the ICANN68 Policy Forum. This round is only open to candidates who have previously completed an ICANN Fellowship. ICANN68 will take place from 22 to 25 June 2020 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The deadline to apply is 15 December 2019, 23:59 UTC.

ITI Releases Board Meeting Content for Feedback

Thumb iti blog update

The Information Transparency Initiative Team (ITI) released a new search experience for Board Meeting content for your feedback. The improvements include search filters by document type (Resolutions, Minutes, Agenda); date; and more. We need your input! Click the link above to submit your feedback. Reminder, the alpha site is in active development.

View All

A note about our privacy policies and terms of service:

We have updated our privacy policies and certain website terms of service to provide greater transparency, promote simplification, and align with recent changes in privacy laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."