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ICANN Community

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ICANN Community

Since ICANN was formed in 1998, the Internet and the world have changed immensely. Adapting to these changes is critical for the health and effectiveness of ICANN.

Thinking ahead to 2018, what attributes and characteristics do ICANN's evolved, successful community structures and processes have? What do they look like?

Here are just a few examples of the many questions and suggestions that the community is considering in this area:

  • Enable online collaboration to support distributed work for effective participation without physical attendance.
  • Attract top talent to the ICANN community to enable a culture of excellence and expertise.
  • How might the ICANN's multi-stakeholder model evolve to better support the growing and internationalizing Internet users and providers?
  • How might the policy and decision-making processes and structures evolve to be more flexible, nimble, inclusive and responsive to growth and disruption?

Summary of comments on ICANN Community [PDF, 92 KB].

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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."