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Interview rodriguez nic pr icann61 local host 750x425 10mar18 en

An Interview with Pablo Rodriguez of NIC.PR, ICANN61's Local Host

By Brad White, Director, North American Communications, and Alexandra Dans, Senior Manager, Latin American and Caribbean Communications | 10 Mar 2018

  • Enhancing Transparency in Contractual Compliance Reporting

    In an earlier blog, Enhancing Transparency in Contractual Compliance, I briefed the community on the Contractual Compliance department's initiative to enhance transparency around our reporting. I'd like to briefly update you on this initiative's latest developments. Our...

  • Welcome to Puerto Rico! ¡Bienvenidos a San Juan!

    Chris Mondini, ICANN's VP, Stakeholder Engagement for North America and Global Business Engagement, welcomes you to the beautiful city of San Juan. The ICANN61 Community Forum is welcoming nearly 2,000 participants from 150 countries. Over 300 sessions will tackle a range...

  • Data Protection/Privacy Issues Update: Discussion with Article 29

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    As we prepare to depart to San Juan for the ICANN61 meeting, I wanted to provide you with the latest update on our efforts related to compliance with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There have been a number of webinars and calls organized...

  • Towards a Multilingual Internet - Recent Discussions in Guangzhou

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    Chinese domain names have always been popular in China. Owing to supportive policies, as well as the rapid mobile Internet penetration in China, corporations and individuals are increasingly familiar with and using more Chinese domain names. To my knowledge, international...

  • Furthering Government Participation in ICANN

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    In my previous blogs (parts 1 and 2), I discussed the need for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region to participate in ICANN's multistakeholder model. I want to share a recent engagement to facilitate government participation and opportunities for our region to collaborate...

  • Talking DNS Business in the Caribbean: The Launch of VDECC

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    In terms of Internet, one may say that Port of Spain is the equivalent of Montevideo in the Caribbean region. Why? Because the capital of Trinidad & Tobago is the proud host of key organizations that serve the entire region in the digital development agenda. This is...

  • Operating Standards: Overview and Next Steps

    The public comment period for draft Operating Standards for ICANN's Specific Reviews closed on 2 February 2018. Thank you to all who contributed for your diverse and constructive submissions. The Operating Standards will guide how ICANN Specific Reviews are conducted....

  • LACTLD at ICANN Meetings This Year

    A year full of challenges has started – requiring more and more of our commitment and participation. We are fortunate to be an active region and to have many opportunities to participate. LACTLD is pleased to be part of the council of ICANN's Latin America and Caribbean...

  • RDS-WHOIS2 Review Team Submits Terms of Reference and Work Plan

    The Registration Directory Service Review Team (RDS-WHOIS2) developed and submitted its terms of reference and corresponding work plan to the ICANN Board to ensure that the team's scope and timeline is consistent with the requirements of the ICANN Bylaws.1 As the team...

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

    Just a month ago, the ICANN Board met in Los Angeles for our first workshop of calendar 2018, and we are already preparing to head to San Juan for what will surely be another productive workshop, from 9 to 11 March, followed by a busy ICANN61. Starting on Friday, 9 March,...

  • Executive Team Update

    I want to extend my warmest wishes and heartfelt thanks to Duncan Burns, Senior Vice President of Global Communications and Managing Director, Washington D.C. Office, who has decided to leave the ICANN organization at the end of March, after ICANN61. In the nearly five...

  • Data Protection/Privacy Update: Latest Developments

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    My last blog of 25 January focused on the input received on the three proposed interim models for collecting registration data and implementing registration directory services in preparation for the 25 May 2018 enforcement date for the European Union's General Data...

  • Supporting Standards that Ensure an Open and Interoperable Internet

    The Internet as we know it today owes its development and scalability to the meticulous work of thousands of volunteers who develop technical standards and specifications that ensure global interoperability. This work is mostly done by the Internet Engineering Task Force...

  • Chair’s Blog: The Los Angeles Workshop Recap

    With about a month left before many of us gather in Puerto Rico, I wanted to share with you an overview of the most recent Board workshop. Washington, D.C. Visit On my way to Los Angeles for the Board workshop, I stopped in Washington, D.C. for a few days to meet with...

  • Progressing the IANA functions into 2018

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    The last few years have been a period of intense focus on ICANN and the IANA functions — which are the management of key services including updating the DNS root zone, allocating global Internet Protocol address blocks to Regional Internet Registries, and assigning...

  • Announcing Draft Plan For Continuing With The KSK Roll

    A formal ICANN public comment period has been opened to receive community input on a draft plan [PDF, 93 KB] to proceed with the KSK rollover project. This comment period will run until 1 April 2018 and we are eager to receive any and all comments. The plan calls for...

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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."