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  • Welcome to ICANN66!

    Bonjour! Welcome to ICANN’s 66th Public Meeting, which is being held in Montréal, Canada. ICANN’s last Public Meeting held in Canada, ICANN45 in Toronto, was back in 2012. Quite a lot has changed since then. ICANN Public Meetings are a vital part of the multistakeholder...

  • Discontinuing Support for ICANN-Rooms Hotel Networks

    ICANN has decided to use the hotel's own Wi-Fi networks rather than creating ICANN's service set identifiers (SSIDs) at the hotel sites. The hotel manages and brands in-room Wi-Fi networks that appear as ICANN networks using a SSID; however, ICANN does not manage, own, or...

  • The First Message Transmission

    NOTE: Fifty years ago, two things happened that changed the world. First a human being set foot on the moon, then three months later a simple message between two computers marked an important step in the development of the Internet. In this special guest blog, Dr. Leonard...

  • ICANN org Seeks European Data Protection Board Input

    Today, the ICANN org sent to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) a paper, "Exploring a Unified Access Model for gTLD Registration Data," which outlines a proposed Unified Access Model (UAM) based on the Technical Study Group's technical model. The model described in...

  • Evolution of WHOIS Protocol to RDAP - What You Need to Know

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    The WHOIS protocol, or Port 43, has been the standard to access domain name registration data for more than 35 years. For most of ICANN's existence, the community has discussed issues related to registration data (or in ICANN-speak, Registration Data Directory Services,...

  • Board Blog: A Preview of the Montréal Board Workshop

    From 30 October to 3 November, the ICANN Board will meet in Montréal, Canada, ahead of ICANN66, for its sixth and final workshop of the calendar year. At this point, three years after the IANA Stewardship Transition (30 October 2016) a lot of progress has been made...

  • About the FY20 Board Activities and Operational Priorities

    ICANN66 in Montreal, Canada, is just around the corner, and the ICANN Board would once again like to share its activities and operational priorities for Fiscal Year[1] 2020 (FY20), much like it did in previous years. Please find my FY19 blog here. The Board’s activities...

  • A Blog about Friendship

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    We have a Swedish saying for when someone you love passes away: He is missed in me. As you now know, our dear friend Tarek has passed away and he is missed in me. There will be many eulogies written about this remarkable man who touched so many. I think many of us have...

  • Zoom Security Update

    Zoom recently added new settings to increase security and ensure meeting privacy. These new settings will enforce a password on all new meetings scheduled, but will not affect meetings that have been scheduled prior to 29 September 2019. The only participants who will be...

  • Public Comment Guidelines for the ICANN Organization

    Public Comment is a mechanism that gives the ICANN community and other stakeholders an opportunity to provide input and feedback on ICANN's work. It ensures ICANN and its community "operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner and consistent...

  • ICANN President & CEO Goals for Fiscal Year 2020

    Each year, I seek to focus the ICANN organization on strategic opportunities for improvement. A key element of this process is working with the ICANN Board to set my goals for the next fiscal year. As part of our commitment to accountability and transparency, I am sharing...

  • Chair’s Blog: Wrapping up the Los Angeles Workshop

    In this blog, I share some of the more significant discussions from the ICANN Board workshop that was held earlier this month on 6-8 September in Los Angeles, California, as well as a summary of the key resolutions passed during the public Board meeting. We followed the...

  • ICANN’s Carbon Footprint

    As you may have seen in the Operating Initiatives document put out for Public Comment earlier this year, one of the initiatives ICANN org will undertake in support of the ICANN Strategic Plan for FY 2021-2025 includes an evaluation of the long-term effectiveness,...

  • EPDP Team Makes Key Progress in Phase 2 Work

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    As the Chair of the Expedited Policy Development Process on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data Team (EPDP Team), I am pleased to report that the EPDP Team has made crucial progress towards our development of a System for Standardized Access/Disclosure...

  • The Board Leadership Slate

    I have an important message to share with you. The Board has selected Maarten Botterman as the next Chair of the ICANN Board following the process outlined in the Board Governance Committee Practice for Board Engagement in Developing Slate for Board Leadership. I am proud...

  • Chair’s Blog: A Preview of the Los Angeles Board Workshop

    The ICANN Board will meet for its fifth workshop of the calendar year on 6-8 September in Los Angeles, California. At this workshop we will welcome the three 2019 Nominating Committee selected Board members: Mandla Msimang (new), Ihab Osman (new) and Maarten Botterman...

  • North America Stakeholder Engagement Closes FY19 on a High Note

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    Every year, ICANN's Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) team produces a report on the progress made towards the North America Stakeholder Engagement Strategy. Today, I'm excited to release our latest year-end report. The report, which covers all of Fiscal Year (FY) 2019,...

  • Updated Lookup Tool for Domain Name Registration Data Now Available

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    Today, ICANN is launching an updated version of its lookup tool that makes use of the Registration Data Access Protocol, known as RDAP, to query, parse, and display registration data in a human-friendly format. The lookup tool – which gives users the ability to look up...

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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."