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Cheers to the Multistakeholder Community

By Steve Crocker | 30 Sep 2016

  • Final Implementation Update

    In mid-August, ICANN submitted an Implementation Planning Status Report to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The report provided a thorough inventory of the work that was accomplished by ICANN and the multistakeholder community to...

    30 Sep 2016 | By Akram Atallah

  • Exploring Cybersecurity Topics on a Whirlwind Tour of Eastern Europe

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    ICANN's Dave Piscitello (second from left) takes part in a panel at CYBERSEC 2016, a conference on cybersecurity held this week Krakow, Poland. This week I begin a two–week series of Identifier Systems Security, Stability and Resiliency (IS SSR) team and Global...

    27 Sep 2016 | By Dave Piscitello, VP of Security and ICT Coordinator

  • Sharing Links Over Email: Security @ ICANN

    Many of you have read earlier posts by our CIO Ashwin Rangan regarding our ongoing improvements to ICANN's overall cybersecurity. This is a brief update on some recent security changes we've made to email services, some of which will be noticeable to many in the ICANN...

    27 Sep 2016 | By Ashwin Rangan

  • News from Identifier Technology Health Indicators (ITHI)

    ICANN recently organized an ITHI workshop in its Washington DC office on September 7th. We had 18 participants, 11 of them from the community, representing a variety of stakeholders: DNS operators, registry operators, registrars, ISPs, content providers, government, etc....

    22 Sep 2016 | By Alain Durand

  • From mitigation to integration: III LAC DNS Forum in Santo Domingo

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    Last month we visited the Dominican Republic to celebrate the 25th delegation anniversary of .DO, its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). To commemorate this milestone the Latin American community organized “Internet Week,” which featured several special events with...

    21 Sep 2016 | By Daniel Fink, Senior Stakeholder Engagement Manager for Brazil, ICANN

  • Update on Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review

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    Photo caption: Members of the CCT-RT meeting in Vienna Members of the Competition, Consumer Trust & Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT-RT) recently wrapped up a two-day face-to-face meeting in Vienna, Austria on 29-30 August (archives can be found here). The CCT Review...

    09 Sep 2016 | By Jonathan Zuck

  • Building A Class of Informed and Engaged Young Internet Leaders in Asia Pacific

    APIGA participants and trainers showing their love for the APIGA program. The hand sign is a Korean “heart.” (Photo Credits: KISA) “Any questions?” The usual question at the end of a lecture is also, quite often, the lecturer’s dreaded start to an uncomfortable spell of...

    30 Aug 2016 | By Kelvin Wong, Head of Outreach and Public Responsibility, APAC

  • What Is an Internet Covert Channel?

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    A covert channel is an evasion or attack technique that is used to transfer information in a secretive, unauthorized or illicit manner. A covert channel can be used to extract information from or implant information into an organization. An Internet covert channel is the...

    29 Aug 2016 | By Dave Piscitello, VP of Security

  • Creating the Services You Want

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    Ashwin Rangan, ICANN's Head of Engineering, and I have been talking for some time now about how to provide everyone with continuous visibility into our engineering work. One means of increasing visibility is through the creation of community-led Technical Task Forces...

    24 Aug 2016 | By Chris Gift

  • ICANN57 Hyderabad: What You Need to Know (Part 2)

    Further to my blog on 25 July 2016, I would like to share details on visa applications to assist all who are attending ICANN57 Annual General Meeting in Hyderabad with your travel planning. We have worked extensively with the India government to ensure a clear and smooth...

    16 Aug 2016 | By Nick Tomasso | Vice President, Meetings

  • Implementation Planning, Execution, and NTIA’s Response

    In order to fulfill the tasks assigned by NTIA and the community-developed proposals for the IANA stewardship transition, ICANN and the multistakeholder community have dedicated significant time and resources over the past eight months developing plans for implementation....

    16 Aug 2016 | By Akram Atallah

  • The Changing Face of the LACIGF

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    The Latin American and Caribbean regional preparatory meeting for the Internet Governance Forum (LACIGF) was held in San Jose, Costa Rica, from 26 to 29 July. It was the ninth edition of a process that started in 2008 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Eight years later, the process...

    16 Aug 2016 | By Alexandra Dans, Senior Communications Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean

  • ICANN Ombudsman Herb Waye

    I took office last week and on my first day as ICANN Ombudsman spent the day working with ICANN LA staff. I would like to sent a big shout out to the ICANN LA staff for all their assistance; technical, administrative, and operational. You got me up and running with social...

    07 Aug 2016 | By Herb Waye

  • Call for Volunteers for SSR2 Review Team

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    ICANN is seeking a geographically diverse team of security experts to look at operational stability and resiliency matters relating to the coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers. If this sounds like you, less than two weeks remain for you to volunteer...

    04 Aug 2016 | By Karen Mulberry

  • Coffee Beans and the Ethiopic Script

    Last month, we visited Addis Ababa to hold a workshop for the Ethiopic Script Generation Panel. Upon arriving, while being introduced to the rich history and culture of Ethiopia, we were told that coffee beans originated from Kaffa, which was a medieval kingdom in ancient...

    03 Aug 2016 | By Sarmad Hussain and Yaovi Atohoun

  • IANA Stewardship Transition Implementation Planning Update (Volume 4)

    ICANNis compiling updates on the progress of theIANAStewardship Transition and EnhancingICANNAccountability implementation planning efforts. This information is positioned to help inform interested stakeholders on the recent developments in the processes, upcoming key...

    26 Jul 2016 | By Trang Nguyen

  • ICANN57 Hyderabad: What You Need to Know

    As ICANN57 draws closer, I wantto provide some clarity on how this meeting will be different from past meetings, and what you should expect. In 2014, the ICANN Board approved the community’s New Meeting Strategy & Implementation Plan, which outlined the structure for...

    25 Jul 2016 | By Nicholas Tomasso

  • DNSSEC: Rolling the Root Zone Key Signing Key

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    ICANN today posted plans to update or "roll" the Root Zone Key Signing Key (KSK), marking another significant step in our ongoing efforts aimed at improving the security of the Domain Name System (DNS). The KSK rollover plans were developed by the Root Zone...

    22 Jul 2016 | By David Conrad, ICANN Chief Technology Officer

  • Hundreds Gather at IGF-USA to Tackle Pressing Internet Issues

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    Photo caption: Attendees await the start of a panel at IGF-USA, held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: Glenn McKnight As in recent years, ICANN issues featured prominently in the 2016 edition of the Internet Governance...

    20 Jul 2016 | By Joe Catapano, Program Manager, ICANN Global Stakeholder Engagement for North America

  • Tracking gTLD Marketplace Health

    Today, ICANN published the gTLD Marketplace Health Index (Beta), which presents statistics and trends related to generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN intends to publish these statistics biannually to track progress against its goal of supporting the evolution of the...

    19 Jul 2016 | By Cyrus Namazi

  • ICANN56 Technical Report Now Available!

    We're pleased to present the ICANN56 Technical Report, which summarizes our findings from ICANN's first Policy Forum. Meeting technical reports are part of ICANN's commitment to transparency. These metrics also help us improve meetings, as we learn what attendees want,...

    18 Jul 2016 | By Josh Baulch

  • Presenting Our Mitigation Plan for Latin America and the Caribbean

    Earlier this year, ICANN decided to move ICANN56 from Panama City, Panama, to Helsinki, Finland, and ICANN57 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Hyderabad, India. In response, ICANNs Global Stakeholder Engagement team drafted a mitigation plan to alleviate the negative...

    12 Jul 2016 | By By Rodrigo de la Parra, ICANN Vice President of Stakeholder Engagement, Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Blog Update: BGC's Comments on Recent Reconsideration Request

    Earlier this week ICANN's Board Governance Committee (BGC) recommended that the ICANN Board deny a Reconsideration Request from dotgay LLC, in which it objected to emails to authors of letters of support having been sent by an administrator at the Community Priority...

    29 Jun 2016 | By Chris Disspain

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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."