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Public Comment Opportunities

Public Comment is a mechanism that gives the ICANN community and other stakeholders an opportunity to provide input and feedback. Public Comment is a key part of the policy development process (PDP), allowing for refinement of recommendations before further consideration and potential adoption. Public Comment is also used to guide implementation work, reviews, and operational activities of the ICANN organization.

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Upcoming Public Comment Proceedings

In order to keep the community informed about future public comments proceedings, this page provides high-level descriptions for topics that are under consideration with links to relevant documents that can provide more context where applicable. The topics and dates presented are offered as informed predictions of when certain proceedings are expected to open, but should not be relied upon as specific date announcements.

How Public Comment Works

Public comment proceedings feature proposals initiated by a working group or department. Click on a proceeding to learn more about the issue and note key dates in the process.

To learn more about operational consultations, please visit this page.


Submissions and Transparency

Submitting comments requires adherence to the ICANN Expected Standards of Behavior and is subject to the ICANN Terms of Service. All comments and email addresses are captured and displayed in the archive for each proceeding and are visible by the public. Please contact the proceeding facilitator for other submission options.

Summary Report Inquiry

If you believe an error has been made in a public comment summary report, please send an email to
public-comment@icann.org identifying the proceeding, explaining the nature of the error, and recommending an appropriate remedy.

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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."