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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

Improving Our Public Meetings: Timelines and Milestones

  |   By Sally Costerton, Senior Vice President, Global Stakeholder Engagement; and David Olive, Senior Vice President, Policy Development Support

Join An ITI Webinar and Get a Preview of the Changes Coming to icann.org

  |   By Sally Newell Cohen, Senior Vice President, Global Communications

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Announcements

Call for Expressions of Interest: Community Representatives Group to Select Independent Review Process Standing Panel

  |   By ICANN

Registration Now Open for the 2020 LAC Domain Names Week

  |   By ICANN

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News And Announcements

Join Us for an ITI Webinar on 1 December

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The Information Transparency Initiative team will be holding two webinars on Tuesday 1 December 2020 to demonstrate the changes implemented to improve your search experience, specifically enhancements to Correspondence, Board Materials, and Acronyms and Terms. Click on the title above to learn more.

Improving Our Public Meetings: Timelines and Milestones

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Thank you to our community for taking the time to complete the Public Meeting survey. Read about the next steps in using these results to create recommendations for improving Public Meetings. Click the title to learn more.

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.

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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."