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Resources

Governance Documents

Articles of Incorporation

Articles of Incorporation for ICANN.

Board Code of Conduct

ICANN's expected standards of ethical conduct for Board members and Liaisions. The Board has also developed Code of Conduct Guidelines on encouraging adherence to the Code of Conduct and how to address potential breaches of the Code.

Board Conflicts of Interest Policy

Policy to ensure that the deliberations an decisions of ICANN are made in the interest of the global Internet community.

Board Governance Guidelines

Board governance policies and practices.

Board Meeting Transcripts, Minutes & Resolutions

ICANN Board of Directors' meeting dates, notes and minutes.

Board Statements of Interest

Summary of Board Member and Board Liaison statements of interests disclosed pursuant to the Conflicts of Interest Policy.

Bylaws and Bylaws Archives

The bylaws outlining ICANN's powers and responsibilities, and previous versions of the ICANN bylaws.

ICANN Conflict of Interest Enforcement and Compliance Report

Summary of Conflicts of Interest and Ethics Practices Review

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."