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Resources

ICANN for Business

Any business that depends upon the Internet has a stake in ICANN's work. This page provides access to resources for private sector stakeholders interested to learn more about the work of ICANN and how a global, scalable, interoperable Internet benefits their business and bottom line.

Get Involved

Private sector interests are represented in a variety of ways at ICANN. For more information and to become an active participant in ICANN's decisions visit the Generic Names Supporting Organization's (GNSO) website and learn more about the constituencies that represent commercial interests at ICANN:

Interested in technical and security issues? Learn more about these groups:

You can also get involved through one of the business associations that actively participate in ICANN:

 

Resources

Webinars

The Global Business Engagement team hosts webinars before every ICANN public meeting to highlight sessions of interest, opportunities to follow, participate and join work of business stakeholders in their various constituency groups, and discuss the latest topics in the Internet domain name and addressing systems.

ICANN48 | ICANN49 | ICANN50 | ICANN51 | ICANN52 | ICANN53 | ICANN54 | ICANN55 (EN) | ICANN55 (FR-Audio Only) | ICANN57 | ICANN58

Some webinars are also organized for other relevant Internet governance related events in order to inform private sector participation.

NETmundial 1 | NETmundial 2

ICANN Meetings Business Digest

The Business Digest is designed to serve as a non-exhaustive review of highlights of the ICANN Public Meetings relevant to a variety of businesses stakeholders affected by ICANN's work, presented in business friendly language.

Current and previous issues of the digest are available in different languages on our SlideShare page.

Commissioned Research – The Boston Consulting Group on e-Friction

In 2014, ICANN commissioned a report by the Boston Consulting Group to determine how much the global, interoperable Internet contributes to economic and business success.

The report, titled Greasing the Wheels of the Internet Economy introduced the concept of "e-friction". This is broadly defined as barriers to Internet access, whether within a country or across national borders.

In April 2015, an additional supplement to the report was published. Titled Which Wheels to Grease? Reducing Friction in the Internet Economy, this update expands on the analysis of e-friction by looking at its major causes and at how countries can learn from others that face similar challenges.

In February 2016 the BCG Center for Public Impact published an additional piece of research, which focuses on the digital opportunities for African economies.

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."