Skip to main content

Featured News

Get Updates
Data Protection / Privacy Update

Data Protection/Privacy Update

21 Jun 2018

ICANN GNSO Policy Briefing ICANN62 Edition

GNSO Policy Briefing

21 Jun 2018

ITI

How the ITI Technical Infrastructure Works

21 Jun 2018

Image of Africa continent

The Sixth Africa DNS Forum to take place in Cotonou, Benin

21 Jun 2018

Announcements

German Regional Court to Revisit Ruling in Injunction Proceedings on Request to Preserve WHOIS data

LOS ANGELES – 21 June 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was informed today that the Regional Court in Bonn, Germany, has decided to revisit its ruling in the injunction proceedings that ICANN initiated against...

21 Jun 2018  |  Government, WHOIS

Initial Report on the Protections for Certain Red Cross Names in all gTLDs – Policy Amendment Process

Open Date: 21 June 2018 Close Date: 31 July 2018 Originating Organization: GNSO Categories/Tags: Policy Development Brief Overview: Obtain community input on proposed recommendations for amending...

21 Jun 2018  |  DNS Marketplace, Technology, Announcement

SSAC2 Review: Assessment Report Published for Community Input

LOS ANGELES – 21 June 2018 – Analysis Group, the independent examiner performing the second review of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), has published its assessment report. Read the report [PDF, 761 KB]. Your comments on...

21 Jun 2018  |  SSAC

ICANN Publishes Updated gTLD Marketplace Health Index

LOS ANGELES – 20 June 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that ICANN published an update to the gTLD Marketplace Health Index (Beta), which presents statistics and trends related to generic top-level...

20 Jun 2018  |  gTLD, New gTLDs, DNS Marketplace

BROWSE ALL ANNOUNCEMENTS

Multimedia

0

ICANN62 Welcome Video

ICANN62 Welcome Video from Rodrigo de la Parra

0

ICANN62 Welcome Video | Spanish

Artworks 000317338845 62muha t500x500

Intro to Registrar Stakeholder Group

ICANN's Caitlin Tubergen sits down with RrSG Member, Michele Neylon and RrSG Member, Graeme Bunton to discuss the Policy Development Process 3.0.

Artworks 000317338221 nmskyv t500x500

UASG Members Share EAI and IDN Updates

UASG Members John Levine, Standcore LLC, Andrew Sullivan, IETF, Dr Ajay Data, XgenPlus, and Mark Svancarek, Microsoft share EAI and IDN updates.

BROWSE ALL MULTIMEDIA

Blog Posts

How the ITI Technical Infrastructure Works

Important Changes Coming to The Way You Use Adobe Connect

Outreach & Engagement Leading into ICANN62

BROWSE ALL BLOG POSTS

Sign Up to Get News Updates

Tell us which topics you care about and we'll send updates to your homepage and email.

Already have an Account? Sign In

A note about our privacy policies and terms of service:

We have updated our privacy policies and certain website terms of service to provide greater transparency, promote simplification, and align with recent changes in privacy laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."