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First Root KSK Rollover Successfully Completed

16 Oct 2018

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The Information Transparency Initiative (ITI): Improving Announcement and Blog Findability

16 Oct 2018

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Key Highlights of the High-Level Government Meeting at ICANN63

16 Oct 2018

ICANN63 schedule now available and download the ICANN Meetings app

ICANN Meetings Mobile App and Schedule Now Available

16 Oct 2018

Announcements

ICANN Releases its Final Africa Strategic Plan

ISTANBUL – 20 October 2018 – ICANN's Africa Strategy is the cornerstone of all engagement efforts in the continent. Prepared by the regional ICANN community, it serves as a road map for ICANN's Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) Africa team. Two...

20 Oct 2018  |  DNS Marketplace, Announcement

Request for Proposal: EBERO Services

LOS ANGELES – 17 October 2018 – Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced it is seeking one or more partners to provide Emergency Back-End Registry Operator (EBERO) services. The ICANN organization's EBERO...

17 Oct 2018  |  DNS Marketplace, Technology, Announcement

Call for SOs/ACs to Nominate Fellowship Program Mentors

LOS ANGELES – 16 October 2018 – ICANN's Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) are invited to nominate one individual each (total of 7) to serve in the capacity of mentor for the ICANN Fellowship Program. Mentors will serve...

16 Oct 2018  |  Technology, Announcement

Registration Open for ICANN Academy 2019 Chairing Skills Program

LOS ANGELES – 16 October 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has issued a call for registrations for the 2019 Chairing Skills Program (CSP). The CSP addresses the chairing skill challenges that ICANN community...

16 Oct 2018

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The Evolution of At-Large

Evin Erdogdu, ICANN's Policy Development Senior Coordinator interviews outgoing ALAC Chair Alan Greenberg and incoming ALAC Chair about the development of At-Large.

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Interview with the RDS-WHOIS2 Review Team

Two leaders of the RDS-WHOIS2 Review Team, Alan Greenberg and Susan Kawaguchi, talk about the draft report and key recommendations that came out of the review.

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An Introduction to the Business Constituency (BC)

ICANN's Mary Wong, Policy Senior Director, interviews Steve Del Bianco, BC Member, and Claudia Selli, BC Member. They provide an introduction to the Business Constituency.

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Rod Rasmussen Interview on SAC101: SSAC Advisory

Andrew McConachie, ICANN Technical and Policy Manager, interviews Rod Rasmussen, SSAC Chair during ICANN62.

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Blog Posts

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Announcing My New Deputies

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Ten Things You Didn't Know About Barcelona

Welcome to ICANN63

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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."