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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

ICANN Decides on .COM Amendment and Proposed Binding Letter of Intent between ICANN and Verisign

  |   By By Göran Marby, ICANN President & CEO

EPDP Team Publishes Addendum to Phase 2 Initial Report for Public Comment

  |   By Janis Karklins, EPDP Team Chair

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Announcements

Addendum to the Initial Report of the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data Team – Phase 2

  |   By ICANN

Invitation to Join Strategic Outlook Trends Identification Session

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Post-ICANN67 Policy Report Now Available

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The Post-ICANN67 Policy Report captures decisions and outcomes from the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. It also reviews additional activities and looks ahead and provides resources to enable sustained engagement on important issues. Click the link above to read the report.

ICANN Events Cancelled

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The GDD Industry Summit and ICANN DNS Symposium scheduled for early May 2020, in Paris, France, have been cancelled due to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak. Click on the link above for more information.

ICANN’s First Version of the Open Data Platform is Now Live

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Register now on ICANN’s new Open Data Platform, enjoy registration benefits, and explore the data and tools available. As part of your stakeholder journey, you can contribute to the improvement of the platform by providing feedback on user experience and data availability. Access the platform by clicking on the link 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."