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Information Transparency Initiative (ITI)

About ITI

ITI is an operational activity to improve ICANN's content governance and infrastructure. ITI's goals include:

  • Creating an integrated ongoing, operational process to govern, preserve, organize, and secure ICANN's public content.
  • Implementing this governance through a new document management system (DMS), the content foundation for ICANN ecosystem-wide governance.
  • Surfacing this content through a new content management system (CMS), which will serve as the backbone for ICANN's external web properties.
  • Enabling a multilingual user experience (in the U.N. six languages) and aim to adhere to W3C AA accessibility standards.
  • Upgrading and establish a future-proof and content agnostic technology landscape.

Next Steps

To help the ITI team prepare for the rollout of the first phase of ITI, we have redirected the ITI Feedback (https://feedback.icann.org) and Preview sites (https://preview.icann.org) to this page.

Throughout this process, the ITI team has been actively engaging with ICANN stakeholders in usability sessions to gather community input. The ITI team will continue to provide opportunities for the community to provide feedback when new content is available.

If you have questions or feedback, please contact the ITI team at informationtransparency@icann.org.

ITI Announcements and Blogs

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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."