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  • Looking Ahead to ICANN65

    In a few days, the ICANN community will gather in Marrakech, Morocco for ICANN65. This will be the fourth Policy Forum and the second to be held in the African region. The Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees have taken the lead in organizing the program for...

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

    From 21-23 June, the ICANN Board will hold its fourth Board workshop of the calendar year, just ahead of ICANN65 in Marrakech, Morocco. ICANN65 will be a policy forum, dedicated primarily to interaction between the ICANN community’s constituency groups, as well as key...

  • ICANN to Launch a Pilot Childcare Grants Program for its Community

    ICANN is making it easier for community members with children (up to 12 years old) to attend ICANN meetings in person by launching the Community Childcare Grants Pilot Program. Starting with ICANN66, the Annual General Meeting in Montréal, Canada, eligible community...

  • ICANN's New Meeting Registration Platform

    ICANN has launched a new registration platform for ICANN Meetings and events. If you have registered in the past 15 months, you may receive an email to confirm or edit your existing profile, as well as past attendance details. Otherwise, you may create a new profile when...

  • Evolving the Governance of the Root Server System

    Today, ICANN org is launching a Public Comment proceeding on evolving the governance of the Root Server System (RSS). We invite the ICANN community to participate in this important work. Following the IANA stewardship transition, the Root Server System Advisory Committee...

  • Chair’s Blog: Wrapping up the Istanbul Workshop

    In this blog, I share some of the more significant discussions from the ICANN Board workshop, which was held earlier this month in Istanbul, Turkey, as well as a summary of the key resolutions passed during the public Board meeting in Istanbul. I will also update you on...

  • ICANN to Participate in the Upcoming Africa Internet Summit

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    This year, members of the ICANN community and organization will participate in the Africa Internet Summit (AIS) taking place in Kampala, Uganda, from 9 to 21 June, which is a multistakeholder conference on information and communication technologies. The Summit will bring...

  • Registration Directory Service (RDS) Roadmap Update

    The ICANN organization (org) wants to keep the community informed as the policy and management of registration data is evaluated. New information about ongoing projects related to Registration Directory Service (RDS) has just been published. Updates to this roadmap,...

  • Coming Soon: Operational Improvements to the RSEP Process

    For the last several months, the ICANN organization has collaborated with the gTLD Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) to improve the efficiency and predictability of the process for reviewing registry operator requests under the Registry Services Evaluation Policy...

  • Raising Awareness About Registrant Issues and Challenges

    Today, the ICANN organization Registrant Program published the second edition of a report on Issues and Challenges Impacting Domain Name Registrants [PDF, 263 KB] containing updated data from the ICANN Global Support Center (GSC), the Contractual Compliance department and...

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

    From 1-3 May, the ICANN Board will convene in Istanbul, Turkey, for its third Board workshop of calendar year 2019. We’ll use this time to discuss and deliberate on some important topics, such as Internationalized Domain Names, the subsequent round of new generic...

  • ATRT3 Review Team Makes Progress at First Face-to-Face Meeting

    The third Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT3) had its first face-to-face meeting in Los Angeles on 3 – 5 April 2019. The main objectives of the meeting were to: Develop and prioritize scope items for our review, as guided by ICANN's Bylaws (see Article 4,...

  • Capacity Development Community Survey Results

    Capacity development has become an increasingly important part of regional engagement for the ICANN organization. Preliminary qualitative data collected from the regional engagement teams indicate requests for technical and leadership training are increasing. This...

  • Next Steps for the Technical Study Group & EPDP

    During ICANN64, the Technical Study Group on Access to Non-Public Registration Data (TSG) presented a Draft Technical Model. The team took feedback from the community of a range of topics and is currently working to revise the Model to reflect the relevant comments. You...

  • Transitioning ICANN's Remote Participation Platform to Zoom

    After careful consideration, ICANN org has decided to transition our official remote participation platform from Adobe Connect to Zoom. In January 2019, we entered into a contract with Zoom to license its product for widespread deployment. Plans are being executed now so...

  • Take Part in ICANN's Age Diversity and Participation Survey

    The ICANN organization has launched an Age Diversity and Participation Survey as a continuation of its pilot project to collect data on ICANN community perceptions involving various forms of diversity. The age survey is an extension of the Gender Diversity and...

  • Chair’s Blog: ICANN64 Meeting & Board Workshop

    With ICANN64 now behind us, I'd like to briefly share thoughts on our week in Kobe, summarize the highlights of the Board workshop, and provide a summary of the key resolutions that the Board recently passed. Our Week in Kobe Let me start by thanking everyone who...

  • A Review of the Eastern European DNS Forum: First Takeaways

    On the 28 January, a community survey was sent out to previous participants of the Eastern European DNS Forum and the regional community as a whole. The survey aimed to understand participant satisfaction and solicit feedback on improvements that could be made to the DNS...

  • Technical Study Group Engages with Community in Kobe

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    After a productive week of meetings with community groups at ICANN64 in Kobe, Japan, the Technical Study Group on Access to Non-Public Registration Data has charted a course toward finishing its work by mid-April. On behalf of the entire team, I'd like to thank the...

  • Next Steps for ICANN Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment

    The ICANN Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment met with a small cross-section of interested community members at ICANN64 in Kobe, Japan, to discuss the Board Working Group's workplan and agree on next steps. The community members in attendance shared many valuable ideas...

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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."