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  • Board Blog: A Preview of the Los Angeles Board Workshop

    It’s amazing how quickly time flies! The new decade is finally upon us, and after a well-deserved break, we’re ready to pick up where we left off in 2019. As you have become accustomed, we share with you our plans for the workshop, and we look forward to sharing our...

  • Preparing for Universal Acceptance in Wuzhen, China

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    (Top) ICANN org engaging the Chinese community in discussions on UA and IDNs in Wuzhen. (Bottom, from left) Newly appointed UA Ambassador Zhijiang Liu with ICANN org's Sarmad Hussain and Jian-Chuan Zhang. Universal Acceptance (UA) is a requirement for a truly multilingual...

  • Chair’s Blog: Looking Ahead to 2020

    On behalf of the Board, I want to thank you for your hard work and dedication in support of fulfilling ICANN’s mission to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers. 2019 has been a year of change, as are most years. Since the...

  • Status Update on .AMAZON Applications – The Next Steps

    An important final step for all domain name applications is delegation. ICANN org is signing three Registry Agreements and Specification 13 Amendments from Amazon EU S.à r.l. (Amazon corporation) for top-level domains (TLDs) .AMAZON, .亚马逊, and .アマゾン. These signed...

  • Public Interest Commitment Dispute Resolution Procedure Improvements

    Over the last several months, the ICANN organization and the gTLD Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) have been working together to make improvements to the Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Procedure (PICDRP) that will improve transparency without materially...

  • .ORG Update

    The proposed acquisition of Public Interest Registry (PIR) by Ethos Capital was announced on 13 November 2019 by the parties and the Internet Society (ISOC). This announcement has raised many questions. In light of this, we want to be transparent about where we are in the...

  • Enhancing ICANN’s Investment Policies

    During ICANN66 in Montréal, Canada, the Board adopted a resolution to include sustainability investment criteria in ICANN's Investment Policies. These sustainability criteria cover Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors. It helps further reduce risk, lead to...

  • Chair's Blog: ICANN66 Meeting & Board Workshop

    With ICANN66 now behind us, I want to thank you for your participation, whether you attended in-person or joined us remotely. Our time in Montréal was very productive, and I continue to be impressed by the dedication and passion of both the ICANN community and the ICANN...

  • ICANN Takes DNS Discussions to the 14th Internet Governance Forum

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    The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is taking place in Berlin, Germany, from 25 to 29 November 2019. Members of the ICANN Community, Board, and organization will participate in the event, hosted by the Government of Germany at Estrel...

  • Recognizing Our Community

    Community-driven work is at the core of ICANN's mission. Our community spends countless hours in working groups within ICANN's Supporting Organizations, Advisory Committees, and other groups, including the Customer Standing Committee, the Empowered Community...

  • A Blog About Leadership

    As ICANN66 comes to an end, so does an era. Nearly a decade ago, the Nominating Committee appointed Cherine Chalaby to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors. Since that time, ICANN has changed tremendously, becoming a trusted partner in the Internet governance ecosystem...

  • ¡Hola México! ICANN is Ready for ICANN67 in Cancún

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    As we close 2019 with ICANN66 in Montréal, Canada, we now focus on the new year for ICANN67 in Cancún, Mexico. It has been 10 years now since we had an ICANN meeting in Mexico. We are glad that our vibrant community will have the opportunity to visit the Latin America...

  • Canada’s Contribution to the Growth of the ICANN Community

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    Canada has been instrumental in the development of the ICANN community. It is home to one of the first country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and was one of the first members of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). As the home country of ICANN66, this is the...

  • Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Montréal, Canada

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    Montréal, the second most populated city in Canada, has an old-world charm that embraces both history and modern culture. As the ICANN community gathers for the Annual General Meeting, read on to learn more about this culturally diverse city hosting our work this week....

  • 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,...

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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."