Skip to main content
Resources

Technical Engagement

Overview

ICANN Technical Engagement (TE) is a key function within ICANN's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO). This team conducts and facilitates technical engagement and outreach globally. The goals are to coordinate, develop, and sustain ICANN's engagement with the global technical community in line with ICANN's Strategic Plan, and to ensure that ICANN constituencies are continuously informed and aware of relevant activities happening within the extended technical community. Much of the team's work within OCTO is focused on optimizing the multiple ways ICANN engages with various stakeholder groups that contribute to maintaining a secure DNS ecosystem.

An overview of the work of the Technical Engagement team.

Who We Are

ICANN's Technical Engagement team is a regionalized team that focuses on delivering specific regional needs in alignment with ICANN overall Strategic Goals.

Visual representation depicting the geographical coverage of each member of the Technical Engagement team.

What Do We Do?

  • Technical presentations (in English, French, and Spanish) on the DNS, DNSSEC, and overall DNS ecosystem security
  • Capacity building (webinars and hands-on)
  • Technical support and collaboration
  • Different regional approaches based on specific needs

Technical Engagement Training Course Catalog

If you are interested in having the TE team present any of the courses listed in the catalog, or would like more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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."