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  • 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...

  • Engagement Efforts with Local Stakeholders in Moscow

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    Göran Marby, President and CEO, ICANN, was in Moscow, Russia, from 22-24 May for a series of meetings with the Russian Internet community. He was joined by David Conrad, Chief Technology Officer, and Tarek Kamel, Senior Vice President for Government and IGO Engagement,...

  • Fourth Annual 2018 GDD Industry Summit Recap

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    During the third week of May, the Global Domains Division (GDD) of the ICANN organization held its fourth annual Industry Summit in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. This year's Summit comprised of 410 attendees from over 32 countries, with dozens more participating...

  • Accountability Indicators Goes from Beta to Version 1

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    Many of you provided constructive feedback since the beta release of our Accountability Indicators last August, which transformed the previous KPI Dashboard. This new platform better communicates our progress towards the strategic and operating plans, and demonstrates the...

  • ICANN Adobe Connect Services Restored

    Today, I am writing to let you know that we are restoring ICANN's Adobe Connect collaboration services, effective 1 June 2018. This decision was made following extensive independent and joint forensics investigations by ICANN org, CoSo Cloud LLC (our Adobe Connect cloud...

  • Final Proposed FY19 Operating Plan and Budget

    Today, we published the final proposed FY19 Operating Plan and Budget and submitted it to the ICANN Board for consideration at the meeting on 30 May 2018. This is an important step in the process to ensure transparency so that you – and the rest of the ICANN community –...

  • Please Comment on the Timing of Reviews

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    The topic of reviews has been an ongoing one over the years. As we went into ICANN61, and during ICANN61, we held many discussions on the budget and priorities for ICANN, as we are working to find ways to operate more efficiently and effectively, while considering the...

  • Chair’s Blog: A Wrap-Up of the Vancouver Board Workshop

    Over the weekend the ICANN Board met on 11-13 May in Vancouver, Canada. We held three public sessions and a public Board meeting, and I hope you were able to join some. In the morning of the first day of the workshop, Friday, we began by meeting with the Root Server...

  • مدونة رئيس مجلس الإدارة: ملخص لورشة عمل مجلس الإدارة في فانكوفر

    خلال عطلة نهاية الأسبوع اجتمع مجلس إدارةICANNفي الفترة 11-13 مايو في فانكوفر بكندا. وعقدنا ثلاث جلسات عامة واجتماعًا عامًا لمجلس الإدارة، وآمل أن تتمكنوا من الانضمام إلى بعض منها. في صباح اليوم الأول من ورشة العمل، يوم الجمعة، بدأنا بالاجتماع مع الرؤساء المشاركينللجنة...

  • ICANN org's Open Data Strategy

    The ICANN organization is a community-based organization and one of our defining principles is that we are an "open" organization. Our strategy for the data we hold must reflect this, and our default position must be that all of our data is open data unless there are good...

  • Adobe Connect Update

    I wanted to give you an update on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plan for a remote participation tool and reinstating Adobe Connect. Based on your overwhelming sentiment, over 75% of you asked in one way or another for Adobe Connect, we...

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

    With ICANN61 now well behind us, the ICANN Board is getting ready for our next workshop, which will be held from 11-13 May in Vancouver, Canada, ahead of the GDD Industry Summit. With so many important activities and discussions happening within ICANN org and the...

  • ICANN to Participate in the 2018 Africa Internet Summit (AIS)

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    The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is sponsoring and participating in the Africa Internet Summit (AIS) from 29 April – 11 May 2018, in Dakar, Senegal. This annual summit is organized by the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) and the...

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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."