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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

The ICANN History Project Explores Global Engagement

  |   By Sally Costerton, SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement

Registration Data Directory Services (RDDS) Roadmap Update

  |   By Isabelle Colas, Sr. Project Coordinator – Policy Research and Data Services

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Announcements

Proposal for Chinese Script Root Zone‬ Label Generation Rules

  |   By ICANN

Upcoming Middle East DNS Forum Postponed

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

ICANN67 FAQ

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We recognize there are many questions about the new virtual format for ICANN67. We have tried to answer some of the most frequently asked questions. Click the link above for more information.

Improving the Public Comment Feature: An Information Transparency Initiative Update

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The ITI team has implemented improved search for Public Comment pages and we’d like your feedback on the enhancements. New features include: keyword search and filters (category and date) of Closed Proceedings, more easily accessible recently published Submissions and Reports, guided Submission forms, and the ability to search Submissions.

ICANN org CEO Report Now Available

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The latest ICANN org CEO report to the Board is now available. This report summarizes each function’s highlights, milestones, and provides an overview of recent activity. Click on the headline above to read more.

ICANN Org Regional Reports Now Available

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The regional reports for Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Middle East are now available. These reports summarize each region’s highlights and milestones, and record community participation in FY19. Click on the headline above to read the reports.

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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."