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  • 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...

  • A Look at ICANN's Creation

    My story begins in ancient times when dinosaurs ruled the earth. It was a time when you could download a movie onto your desktop computer through your 56k dial-up connection if you had a few days. It was a time when more people were on the Minitel in France than on the...

  • ICANN Org Ends FY18 Under Budget with Operations Expenses Contained

    Now that an overview of our FY18 financials has been posted, I’d like to share a few highlights of our financial performance against the budget. All the figures I mention below are preliminary, unaudited figures. At the beginning of FY18, we projected that funding for...

  • Recognizing Our Community

    Community-driven work is at the core of ICANN's mission. Countless hours are spent in working groups across our Supporting Organizations, Advisory Committees, and other groups, including the Customer Standing Committee, the Nominating Committee, and the Public Identifiers...

  • Next Steps to More Secure Systems

    As you know, the ICANN org provides systems and platforms for the ICANN stakeholder community to collaborate. The security and stability of these systems is vital. Our Engineering and Information Technology (E&IT) teams work hard to ensure that these systems are...

  • Announcing My New Deputies

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    I am pleased to announce that I have appointed John Jeffrey, General Counsel and Secretary, and Theresa Swinehart, Senior Vice President, Multistakeholder Strategy and Strategic Initiatives, to serve as my deputies. Each member of the ICANN org Executive Team has a deputy...

  • Ten Things You Didn't Know About Barcelona

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    1. Barcelona is home to nine UNESCO-listed World Heritage sites: seven works of Antoni Gaudí(Parque Güell; Palacio Güell; Casa Mila; Casa Vicens; Gaudí’s work on the Nativity façade and Crypt of La Sagrada Familia; Casa Batlló; Crypt in Colonia Güell), Palau de la Música...

  • Welcome to ICANN63

    ¡Bienvenidos! Welcome to ICANN63– our Annual General Meeting – in Barcelona, Spain. There’s quite a lot taking place this week, between the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)’s High Level Government Meeting, celebrations for ICANN’s 20th anniversary, an impressive...

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

    This week, the ICANN Board will be meeting for its sixth and final workshop of calendar 2018, ahead of ICANN63. While Board workshops are generally held over the span of three days, this workshop will also include an additional two days of onboarding sessions for incoming...

  • A 1998 IANA Technical Seminar I Will Never Forget

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    (NOTE: Louis Touton was ICANN's first employee. He served as ICANN's Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary. His blog is one of a series of occasional pieces written by some of ICANN's early pioneers. They afford us a look back to the early days of ICANN, as we...

  • Revised Community Travel Support Guidelines

    Today, the ICANN organization published revised Community Travel Support Guidelines. The ICANN org began the process of updating the guidelines last year. The goal of this process was to improve the guidelines for supported travelers, as the last revisions were made in...

  • About the FY19 Board Activities & Priorities

    With ICANN63 in Barcelona now on the horizon, the Board felt it appropriate to once again share our activities and priorities for FY19, much like we did last year. They continue to be divided into five key areas of responsibilities, or "blocks," that the Board uses to...

  • Executive Team Announcement

    I want to extend my warmest wishes to Akram Atallah, President, Global Domains Division, who has decided to leave ICANN org for another opportunity after eight years, effective immediately. Akram made many, significant contributions to ICANN in a variety of roles,...

  • ICANN’s Rocky Beginning - When Friends Were Scarce

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    (EDITORIAL NOTE: This blog by Mike Roberts, ICANN's first CEO & President, is one of a series of occasional pieces written by some of ICANN's early pioneers. They afford us a look back to the early days of ICANN, as we commemorate its 20th anniversary. These blogs by...

  • Executive Team Update

    I am pleased to announce that Sally Newell Cohen has joined ICANN org in the role of Senior Vice President, Global Communications, responsible for the communications and language services functions, based in Los Angeles. Sally's first day is today. Most recently Sally...

  • Key Highlights of the High-Level Government Meeting at ICANN63

    On Monday, 22 October, ICANN will be holding its fourth High-Level Government Meeting (HLGM) in Barcelona, Spain, where it will be hosted by the Spanish government during ICANN63. ICANN's HLGM meetings are traditionally hosted every two years, alongside an ICANN Public...

  • 2018 KSK Rollover Operator Preparedness Survey

    From 21 August 2018 until 14 September 2018, the ICANN organization invited over 16,000 network operators to participate in a survey regarding their preparations for the root KSK rollover. The networks chosen for the survey were those that have shown evidence of perfoming...

  • ICANN’s Two Decades of Evolution

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    (EDITORIAL NOTE: This blog by Vint Cerf, often called the “father of the Internet,” is the first of a series of occasional pieces written by some of ICANN’s early pioneers. They are intended to give us a look back at the early days of ICANN as we commemorate its 20th...

  • EPDP Team Makes Important Progress During Los Angeles Meeting

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    Pictured from left to right: Rafik Dammak, Leon Felipe Sanchez, Mark Svancarek, Kurt Pritz, Alan Greenberg, Chris Disspain, Hadia Elminiawi, Fiona Assonga, Beth Bacon, Matt Serlin, Diane Plaut, Marc Anderson, Kristina Rosette, Collin Kurre, Julf Helsingius, Ashley...

  • ICANN - A catalyst for development

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    (EDITORIAL NOTE: This blog by Nii Quaynor, often referred to as to as "the father of the Internet in Africa" is one of a series of occasional pieces written by some of ICANN's early pioneers. They afford us a look back to the early days of ICANN, as we commemorate its...

  • Blog: Celebrating ICANN@20 through your recollections

    ICANN will soon be celebrating its birthday in Barcelona, specifically at ICANN63, 20-25 October 2018. This will be an historic meeting for a number of reasons, a primary one being that it will mark the 20th anniversary of ICANN's formation. It's no secret that ICANN's...

  • 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...

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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."