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ICANN Press Releases | 2023

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2023 | 2022

Press Release: ICANN convenes security experts for 50th time to keep the Internet secure

Los Angeles, California – 12 July 2023

Press Release: Thousands Rally Worldwide to Support a Multilingual Internet

Los Angeles, CA – 3 July 2023

Press Release: International Experts Share Cybersecurity Tips at Hong Kong Forum

SINGAPORE – 28 June 2023

Press Release: ICANN Policy Forum to Convene in Washington, D.C.

Washington D.C. – 6 June 2023

Press Release: Coalition for Digital Africa Turns Focus to Universal Acceptance

Nairobi, Kenya – 13 April 2023

Press Release: Charting Towards a Multilingual and Inclusive Internet

New Delhi, INDIA – 24 March 2023

Press Release: UA Day: Global Effort to Drive a More Inclusive and Multilingual Internet

LOS ANGELES – 9 March 2023

Press Release: ICANN Celebrates International Women's Day with Two Female Leaders at the Helm

LOS ANGELES– 8 March 2023

Press Release: ICANN Seeks Partner Organizations to Provide Internet Access During Emergency Situations

LOS ANGELES – 21 February 2023

Press Release: Coalition for Digital Africa Announces Internet Exchange Point Initiative

ISTANBUL – 1 February 2023

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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."