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  • 2019 Nominating Committee Priorities and Agenda

    On behalf of the 2019 Nominating Committee (NomCom), I would like to update the community on our efforts to find the best candidates for open ICANN leadership positions. The NomCom met for the first time at ICANN63 in Barcelona and was officially seated when the meeting...

  • Global Stakeholder Engagement Launches Capacity Development Survey

    In the ongoing efforts to prioritize the delivery of capacity development services, the Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) team is requesting participation in a short Stakeholder Capacity Development Survey. The survey will run from 8-22 January 2019, with an aim to...

  • ICANN is Revoking the Old Key Signing Key This Week

    If you followed the rollover to the new root zone Key Signing Key (KSK) on 11 October 2018, you might have thought the process is now complete. However, there are a few more important technical steps that need to take place before the KSK rollover is finished. One of...

  • An Update on the IANA Naming Function Review (IFR)

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    We received some questions regarding the IANA Naming Function Review (IFR) and would like to provide you with an update on this important review. As many of you know, the IFR is one of the new accountability mechanisms created as part of the IANA stewardship transition to...

  • Chair’s Blog: Best Wishes for 2019

    On behalf of the Board, I want to thank you for all your hard work and continued engagement this year. I wish everyone a peaceful holiday season and a happy and healthy year ahead. In this blog, I will provide you with an end-of-year update on some outstanding items and...

  • Technical Study Group Publishes Charter

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    Since starting our work in December, the Technical Study Group on Access to Non-Public Registration Data has finalized its charter and set a course for delivering a draft specification for community input in time for the ICANN64 Public Meeting in March 2019. We invite the...

  • Chair’s Blog: Key Take-Aways from the Board’s 360° Evaluation

    Earlier this year, the Board completed its self-evaluation, which is conducted once every two years. The assessment is managed by independent consultants and consists of a written, 25 question survey and supplemented by telephonic interviews with the independent...

  • Draft FY20 Operating Plan and Budget Now Available for Your Feedback

    As a not-for-profit organization working in the public interest, one of the ICANN organization's most important responsibilities is to develop an annual operating budget. We posted our Draft Operating Plan and Budget for Fiscal Year 2020. Long-term financial planning and...

  • Remote Participation at ICANN Meetings

    Each year ICANN hosts three large Public Meetings as a means of providing stakeholders with in person meeting opportunities. ICANN Meetings include workshops, public forums, and working meetings where Internet policies can be discussed and developed. The Meetings are...

  • Your Feedback Needed on the Draft FY20 Operating Plan and Budget

    The Draft FY20 ICANN Operating Plan and Budget documents will be posted for public comment on 17 December. We will host a webinar on 18 December to give an overview of the documents and help prepare you to submit feedback. The webinar will cover: Documents Structure...

  • Improving Access to ICANN org Content

    We know our stakeholders are busy and you don’t always have the time to visit https://icann.org to stay informed of the latest ICANN news. Some of you use a subscription feature called myICANN to receive content updates delivered directly to your email inbox. On 17...

  • Do You Have a Domain Name? Here's What You Need to Know

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    Part V – Renewing Your Domain Name When you register a domain name, you're able to use it for the period of time you registered it for, which is typically between one to ten years. If you want to keep using the domain name and any of the services associated with it (like...

  • Update on Next Steps on Reviews

    The third Accountability and Transparency Review (ATRT3) will begin in January 2019. This Bylaws-mandated review is intended to examine ICANN's execution of its commitment to maintain and improve robust mechanisms for public input, accountability, and transparency so as...

  • Engagement Trip to China – Shanghai and Wuzhen

    Hero1 sally and akinori with caict
    Sally and Akinori with Chinese Academy of Information Communication Technology (CAICT)President Liu Duo (left) and Liu Yue, Director, Center of Internet Governance Research (right) After wrapping up our work for ICANN63 in Barcelona, Spain, I visited Shanghai and Wuzhen...

  • Chair's Blog: ICANN63 Meeting & Board Workshop

    Thank you all for your participation in ICANN, and your efforts in Barcelona. Everyone worked hard and I hope you're all back safely home and catching up. In this blog, I will briefly summarize the salient points from the Board workshop, share some thoughts on the Annual...

  • SSR2 Review Team: Seven Highlights from Our Meeting at ICANN63

    The Second Security, Stability, and Resiliency (SSR2) Review Team has continued to make significant progress since restarting our work in June 2018. We held our most recent face-to-face meeting over two days at ICANN63 in Barcelona, Spain. While there, we also held a...

  • Data protection/privacy issues: ICANN63 wrap-up and next steps

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    With ICANN63 now behind us, I want to take this opportunity to provide an overview of some of the important discussions and feedback we received at the meeting. I would also like to share with you some next steps as they relate to continued work to seek guidance and...

  • Accountability Indicators Feedback 1 July - 30 September 2018

    As promised in July, we published the first quarterly update to Accountability Indicators for FY19 in October. This change both helps us work more efficiently and allows us to show longer trends to make the charts more meaningful. This is part of a series of improvements...

  • The Recent KSK Rollover: Summary and Next Steps

    As we hope you have already heard, the main cryptographic key for the DNS root zone was changed on 11 October 2018 in an elaborately orchestrated series of steps. The result was exceptionally good: There were far fewer Internet users negatively affected by the change...

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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."