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  • The ICANN History Project Explores Global Engagement

    Through the voices of the Internet pioneers and ICANN community leaders, the newest collection in The ICANN History Project explores how our international engagement has grown. In this new Global Expansion track of video interviews we explore how ICANN has expanded...

  • Registration Data Directory Services (RDDS) Roadmap Update

    As ICANN org continues to keep the community informed regarding the evolution of policy and management of registration data, new information regarding ongoing projects related to Registration Data Directory Services (RDDS) has been published. Updates to this RDDS roadmap...

  • ATRT3 Brussels Meeting Recap and Looking Ahead to Cancún

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    From 7 to 9 February 2020, the third Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT3) held a face-to-face meeting at the ICANN office in Brussels, Belgium. We had a nearly full-house turnout of review team members who actively participated in the meeting either...

  • Feedback Needed For ICANN Asia Pacific Regional Plan FY21-25

    As we approach the new Financial Year in July 2020, the Asia Pacific (APAC) regional office is working to align its focus areas and activities to the ICANN FY21-25 Strategic Plan. We are currently seeking the APAC community's feedback and input on our draft APAC Regional...

  • ICANN Meets with Belgian Data Protection Authority

    The ICANN organization met with the Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA) on 14 February 2020 to continue the dialogue about a possible Unified Access Model (UAM) for gTLD registration data. The meeting followed publication of ICANN org’s “Exploring a Unified Access...

  • Update on ICANN67 Planning and COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

    The ICANN Board and ICANN org have been closely monitoring COVID-19 since it was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. The World Health Organization now considers COVID-19 a global health emergency. As we approach ICANN67 in Cancún, Mexico, we continue to...

  • Root Key Signing Key Ceremony Postponed

    The 40th Root Key Signing Key Ceremony, originally scheduled for 12 February 2020 in El Segundo, California, has been postponed. One of the security mechanisms that protects the contents of the secure safes was found to be malfunctioning. The safes contain critical...

  • .COM Public Comments and Facts

    ICANN Public Comment is a mechanism that gives the ICANN community and stakeholders an opportunity to provide input and feedback. Public Comment is used in the policy development process, and to guide implementation work, reviews, and operational activities of the ICANN...

  • Chair’s Blog: Los Angeles Board Workshop

    From 24 to 26 January 2020, the ICANN Board held its first workshop of the calendar year at ICANN’s Los Angeles, California, office. Holding our workshop in an ICANN office is a great opportunity to strengthen the collaboration between the Board and the ICANN org, so the...

  • An Update on the Coronavirus and Its Impact on ICANN

    As you are likely aware, there has been an outbreak of a new coronavirus, 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCOV), which was first identified in Wuhan, China. The virus has spread, with confirmed cases currently in 18 countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) has...

  • It’s Time to Move Away From Using SHA-1 in the DNS

    Earlier this month, cryptographers Gaëtan Leurent and Thomas Peyrin published an attack on the security of the SHA-1 hash algorithm that is used throughout the Internet. SHA-1 has been superseded by better hash algorithms for almost 20 years, but it is still in widespread...

  • 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...

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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."