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  • The Second Annual ICANN DNS Symposium

    The ICANN organization's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) organized the second annual ICANN DNS Symposium (IDS), a one-day event focused on all aspects of the Domain Name System (DNS). IDS 2018 was held last Friday, July 13, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and...

  • A Review of Our FY18 Middle East Journey

    The year was filled with accomplishments as well as challenges for ICANN in the Middle East. As we build upon our accomplishments and learn from the challenges, we take this opportunity to present a report on our regional activities. But before doing so, we'd like to...

  • Enforcing the Temporary Specification

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    In May, the ICANN Board adopted the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data, modifying our agreements with registries and registrars to comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Since then, ICANN Contractual Compliance has...

  • Chair’s Blog: ICANN62 Meeting & Board Workshop

    Thank you to everyone who participated in a successful ICANN62. Our gracious hosts in Panama made the meeting experience easy, and the active participation both from those joining remotely from their homes and those in the rooms made it very productive. In addition to...

  • Office of the CTO Activities Brief: January to June 2018

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    The first half of 2018 has been busy for the ICANN organization's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) team. We have been involved in endeavors around the globe to increase engagement with our peers and partners and improve knowledge of the Internet's system of...

  • A Review of the Middle East DNS Forum: Five Years and Counting

    When the Middle East DNS Forum reached its five-year milestone, a community survey was sent to previous participants, as well as the broader Middle East community, on 23 May 2018. The survey is aimed at assessing whether the forum has succeeded in addressing the concerns...

  • Looking Ahead to ICANN63 in Barcelona

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    I'd like to thank everyone in the ICANN community who made ICANN62 a success. Policy Forums give stakeholders in our Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees the important opportunity to work closer together for four intensive days of policy work and outreach....

  • Co-Chairs Statement from CCWG-Accountability Meeting in Panama City

    On 24 June 2018, the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) held a face-to-face meeting in Panama City, Panama to complete its discussions on Work Stream 2. 61 members and participants attended in-person and remotely using...

  • Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Panama

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    The Panama hat is really from Ecuador – its name comes from the fact that the hats passed through Panama en route to other destinations around the world. By the 1840s, tens of thousands of these tropical hats were being sent from Ecuador to Panama. The hat became even...

  • Community Onboarding Pilot Program ICANN62 Update

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    ICANN62 marks the conclusion of the ICANN Community Onboarding Pilot Program (COP). In Panama City, Panama, 20 individuals from eight community groups came together on 24 June to take stock of the progress to date and discuss plans for how each individual community group...

  • Greetings from Panama City

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    David Olive, Senior Vice President, Policy Development, extends a warm welcome to everyone attending ICANN62, the third Policy Forum and the first in the Latin American and Caribbean region. ICANN62's intensive program was organized by ICANN's Supporting Organizations and...

  • Welcome to ICANN62!

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    I'm excited to welcome you to Panama City, Panama, for ICANN62. This is the second time an ICANN meeting has been held in Central America, and the first time we've come to Panama. ICANN meetings represent an important opportunity for our diverse stakeholders to meet...

  • How the ITI Technical Infrastructure Works

    We've blogged previously that the Information Transparency Initiative (ITI) is a foundational project that aims to establish content governance and rebuild our underlying technical infrastructure. These key foundational deliverables will improve how we manage all of our...

  • Important Changes Coming to The Way You Use Adobe Connect

    As you know, issues were reported with Adobe Connect (AC) during ICANN61 in Puerto Rico and we later restored service. The way you access closed Adobe Connect sessions is changing so that the rooms are more secure. Room administrators or meeting organizers will apply...

  • Outreach & Engagement Leading into ICANN62

    As the ICANN community comes together in Panama for ICANN62, the Engagement team is planning a series of events for local stakeholders and with regional partners. ICANN is hosting a LAC-i Roadshow event in collaboration with IPANDETEC on 22 June. Our partners will be...

  • Sensibilisation et participation en vue de la 62e réunion de l'ICANN

    La communauté de l'ICANN se réunit au Panama pour la 62e réunion de l'ICANN ; parallèlement, l'équipe de participation prépare une série d'événements pour les parties prenantes locales et avec des partenaires régionaux. Le 22 juin, l'ICANN accueillera l'événement LAC-i...

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

    We are less than two weeks away from ICANN62in Panama City, Panama. That means the Board is once again getting ready for another workshop, which will be held from 22-24 June, right before the meeting. If you’ll recall, we reorganized our last workshop in Vancouver to...

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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."