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Board Blog: A Preview of the Los Angeles Board Workshop

17 Jan 2020

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Make Your Voice Heard on ICANN’s Future

17 Jan 2020

ICANN67 Prep Week

Register for ICANN67 Prep Week Webinars

17 Jan 2020

Apply Now ICANN NomCom

Apply Now for ICANN and PTI Leadership Positions

17 Jan 2020

Announcements

Public Interest Registry, ICANN Extend Deadline

LOS ANGELES – 17 January 2020 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Public Interest Registry (PIR) have mutually agreed to a 30-day extension of ICANN's time to review PIR's submissions. Also, ICANN will be...

17 Jan 2020

Register for ICANN67 Prep Week Webinars

LOS ANGELES – 14 January 2020 – Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) released the schedule for ICANN67 Prep Week, which features a series of nine webinars to prepare the community ahead of the Community Forum in...

14 Jan 2020  |  Civil Society, Developing World, DNS Marketplace, Government, Technology, Announcement

Attend Informational Webinar on ICANN’s Draft FY21-25 Operating & Financial Plan and Draft FY21 Operating Plan and Budget

LOS ANGELES – 13 January 2020 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is seeking community input on its draft FY21-25 Operating & Financial Plan and draft FY21 Operating Plan and Budget. Tomorrow, 14 January, is the...

13 Jan 2020  |  Financials

Chris Mondini Appointed ICANN Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement, Europe and Managing Director, Brussels

LOS ANGELES – 13 January 2020 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that Chris Mondini has been appointed Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement, Europe and Managing Director for the Brussels, Belgium...

13 Jan 2020  |  Technology, Announcement

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Implementation of PDP 3.0

Rafik Dammak, GNSO Council Vice Chair (NCSG) and Flip Petillion, GNSO Councillor (IPC) share an update on the PDP 3.0 Implementation.

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Third At-Large Summit (ATLAS III) Update at ICANN66

Olivier Crépin-Leblond, former ALAC Chair, and Maureen Hilyard, ALAC Chair, discuss ATLAS III at ICANN66.

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2020 NomCom Update

Jay Sudowski, Chair of the 2020 ICANN Nominating Committee (NomCom), Ole Jacobsen, the 2020 NomCom Chair-Elect and Damon Ashcraft, the 2020 NomCom Associate Chair, give ICANN's James Cole an update...

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Customer Standing Committee (CSC) Update At ICANN66

Byron Holland, Chair, Inaugural CSC, discusses the successes and future of the CSC.

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Blog Posts

Board Blog: A Preview of the Los Angeles Board Workshop

Open Call for Community Members to Join the New Africa Strategy Working Group

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Preparing for Universal Acceptance in Wuzhen, China

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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."