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  • LACNIC: Celebrating 15 Years of Regional Excellence

    We're currently in Montevideo, Uruguay, for LACNIC28 and the last intercessional ICANN Board Workshop of the year. We can't speak about being at the LACNIC meeting without first conveying our best wishes to our friends and colleagues in the Caribbean and in Mexico who...

  • Chairman’s Blog: Previewing the Montevideo Workshop

    On a regular basis, both in-between ICANN meetings and at the beginning of each ICANN Meeting, the ICANN Board meets in a workshop format. During these workshops, the Board and ICANN’s management team come together for in-depth consideration of important and timely ICANN...

  • Data Protection and Privacy: Progress Update and Next Steps

    In this blog, we want to provide you with an update on our data protection and privacy work as it relates to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In late July, we published the first draft of a matrix of user stories related to registrants' data...

  • Join a Contractual Compliance & Consumer Safeguards Conversation

    Over the past few years there has been an increase in reports of DNS abuse, including malware, phishing and botnets. We have also seen the advent of voluntary agreements between registries and content producers aimed at reducing massive online copyright infringement. In...

  • Achieving the Right Formula for Youth Engagement

    As the Internet continues to expand, it’s becoming more and more important that we involve younger generations, who are digital natives, in Internet governance discussions. They are the future leaders, and we want to encourage them to take an active role in shaping...

  • Do You Have a Domain Name? Here's What You Need to Know (Part 1)

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    Part 1: Why You Need to Keep Your Contact Information Up-to-Date Have you received an email reminder from your registrar sometime in the past year, reminding you to review and update your contact information? You should have. This reminder email may be long and contain a...

  • Improvements to the Quarterly Stakeholder Updates

    We're evolving the Quarterly Stakeholder Updates to serve your needs better. Despite the changes, you will still receive the core information in a transparent and accountable way, and will still be able to ask the ICANN organization questions. After reviewing the data...

  • Celebrating Four Years of Supporting the Asia Pacific Region

    Dear friends and colleagues, Another year has gone by and the APAC regional office is now 4 years old. Please join me and the APAC team as we celebrate our 4th anniversary with a special report. This not only marks 4 years of the ICANN Organization’s presence in the APAC...

  • Introducing the New Accountability Indicators

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    Have you ever wondered how many events ICANN participates in by region and how many people we engage with? Or what is the state of ICANN's financials? Or how much is being spent on travel and meetings? Now you can find all of these answers and more on the beta version of...

  • ICANN Middle East – One Year in Review

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    In July 2016, a community-led working group of over 50 members and observers began working on a three-year regional Middle East engagement strategy, along with a one-year implementation plan. Over the past year, ICANN has made significant progress on this strategy. The...

  • The Kolkata L-Root Instance Journey

    The deployment of the L-Root Instance in Kolkata was initiated as part of the Critical Internet Infrastructure support program. The Internet Society (ISOC) Kolkata Chapter launched in 2013. ISOC Kolkata Chapter’s philosophy has been to facilitate the technical capacity...

  • Taking APAC Space to the Next Level

    Last year, we hosted the first APAC Space in a web conference format. The aim of the new format was to encourage sustained interaction among the community and facilitate active community participation regarding ICANN-related discussions. Since then, we have organized six...

  • The Africa DNS Forum Turns Five

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    The Africa DNS Forum turned five this year, and what a journey it has been. Held from 26-28 July 2017 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and hosted by TZNIC, we sought to choose a theme that captured the signifance of this journey: "Taking stock of the Africa DNS Industry and...

  • ICANN59 Ombuds Harassment Complaint

    I'm writing this blog because I received a complaint that has since been resolved with an apology. The complaint bothered me because it involved historic events that took place before most of us were born. I will not go into details, but it did involve: a) behavior that...

  • Thank You, Africa, for a Successful ICANN59

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    It has been over a month since ICANN59, and yet it already seems like such a long time ago! I'd like to take this opportunity to share a few takeaways from the meeting, which was the third hosted in South Africa, the eleventh on the African continent, and the second...

  • Empowered Community – ICANN Budget and Operating Plans in Effect

    On 17 July 2017, the ICANN Empowered Community confirmed that it was not rejecting any of the following documents previously approved by the ICANN Board on 24 June 2017: ICANN’s FY2018 Budget and Operating Plan IANA’s Budget for FY2018 ICANN’s Five-Year Operating Plan The...

  • Introducing ICANN’s Chief Data Protection Officer (CDPO)

    Data protection and privacy laws and regulations are constantly evolving. One of the ICANN organization’s top priorities continues to be data protection and privacy compliance and maintaining the security of personal data we collect in the course of our operations. As...

  • The Fellowship Spirit

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    On 25 June 2017, ICANN59 Fellowship Alumni gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the program. Finale of a Four-Part Blog Series (Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three) Laughter, song, and conversation filled the air on a Sunday...

  • Nominations for ARIN Elections Now Open

    As of 17 July 2017, American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) Trustees and representatives from ARIN's General Members in Good Standing are invited to nominate candidates for seats on the Board of Trustees and Advisory Council to serve three-year terms beginning 1...

  • Personal Data “Use” Matrix Now Available for Public Review

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    This is our third in a series of blogs (read part one and part two) on the progress we have made related to data privacy and protection regulations, notably on the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will take full effect on 25 May 2018. In...

  • Meet the NextGen from ICANN59

    The NextGen experience at ICANN59 will be a lasting memory for all who were involved. After the meeting was over, the NextGen participants took it upon themselves to create a report highlighting their experiences. The meeting gave them a deeper idea of what ICANN is all...

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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."