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  • New Report: Issues and Challenges Impacting Domain Name Registrants

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    We have been compiling and analyzing data from various sources within the ICANN organization to try and identify pain points, and to raise awareness around the ICANN community about some of the common issues and challenges that registrants are having managing their domain...

  • ICANN GDPR and Data Protection/Privacy Update

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    As part of our ongoing work together on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and seeking clarity for any access mechanism for non-public registration data, I promised to provide regular updates. These updates and any clarity received are input into the...

  • Chair's Blog: A Wrap-Up of the Genval Board Workshop

    Last weekend, the ICANN Board met in Genval, Belgium, to hold our fifth workshop of calendar year 2018. Four incoming Board members were able to join us: Merike Kaeo, Danko Jevtovic, Nigel Roberts, and Tripti Sinha. On Friday, 14 September, Ram Mohan kicked off the...

  • An Update on the Nominating Committee Review

    The implementation planning phase of the second Organizational Review of the Nominating Committee (NomCom) is underway. The Implementation Planning Team (IPT) invites you to take a look at the first scorecard report of our progress, which we have just published here. We...

  • Chair's Blog: A Preview of the Genval Board Workshop

    From 14-16 September, the ICANN Board will be convening in Genval, Belgium, a town just south of Brussels, to hold our fifth workshop of calendar 2018. Much like our Vancouver workshop and Panama City workshop, the Board will be covering quite a lot of ground within a...

  • Moving Forward with RDAP

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    On 31 August 2018 we've posted for Public Comment a set of documents that represent a step forward in the community's work on the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP). Developed by the technical community as an eventual replacement for the WHOIS protocol, RDAP enables...

  • Changes to the ICANN Fellowship Program

    In my last blog about the ICANN Fellowship Program, I wrote about the impending community consultation to review and revise the program to reflect the needs of the community. That process is now complete and we have a proposed way forward. The program's goal is to...

  • ICANN's Asia Pacific Office Turns Five

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    The Asia Pacific (APAC) office is marking an important milestone as we celebrate our fifth anniversary. The regional office, walking hand in hand with you, our APAC community, have come a long way in five years. In our fifth anniversary report, we've put together key...

  • Engaging with the New Generation of Cyber Fighters

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    During the third week of August, I visited São Paulo, Brazil, and Asunción, Paraguay, with the goal of engaging with the community and local law enforcement organizations. We were looking to increase awareness regarding domain name system (DNS) abuse, providing training...

  • Possible Unified Access Model Published for Community Input

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    The ICANN org has been working to further develop its proposal for a possible unified access model, in order to engage in discussions with the community and relevant data protection authorities. Following the June publication of the Framework Elements for a Unified Access...

  • APIGA: From Digital Native to Digital Citizen

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    “As young people, we shouldn’t see being young as a disadvantage, but as a strength because we are digital natives and can offer something fresh to the Internet community.” - Jianne Soriano, Internet Governance Forum Multistakeholder Advisory Group Member In its third...

  • Routine Annual Disaster Recovery Process Is Better Than Ever

    As part of our annual disaster recovery protocol, this year we performed a live transition of our entire catalog of public web services - from our primary data center to our alternate data center. This test included www.icann.org, www.iana.org, whois.icann.org,...

  • Update on ICANN's Strategic Planning Process

    The future of ICANN depends on our ability to work together to anticipate new challenges and opportunities ahead. The strategic outlook and strategic planning processes represent a joint effort between the community, the Board, and the ICANN organization to identify and...

  • A Story of Perseverance: Engagement in Yemen

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    The Middle East is a vast region with an estimated population of 825 million people. Over the past few years, some countries in the region have undergone unprecedented political turbulence, especially Yemen. The current civil war and political crisis in the country has...

  • ICANN and NSRC Collaborate on Training Events

    I'm a collaborator at the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), an organization that supports ICANN in its technical capacity building activities around the world. Over the past decade we've had the pleasure of working alongside ICANN staff to deliver several trainings...

  • Transparency of Security Efforts in ICANN: Update

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    Today, the ICANN organization published our Cybersecurity Transparency Guidelines [PDF, 17 KB], which reaffirm our commitment to a high standard of openness and transparency concerning the security of the systems and services we operate. Late last year, we identified the...

  • Update on the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) Profile

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    I am pleased to report that the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) pilot discussion group has submitted their proposed profile to the ICANN organization, which follows the requirements of the Temporary Specification for gTLD registration data. RDAP delivers...

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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."