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ICANN Redaction Register

22 January 2024

In publishing Board resolutions, Minutes, and Board Briefing Materials, ICANN org redacts a limited set of information as discussed in the ICANN Bylaws, the Guidelines for the Posting of Board Briefing Materials and ICANN Publication Practices for Board, Litigation and Accountability Processes. Beginning in December 2019, ICANN org will update the ICANN Redaction Register (Register) when it posts a new set of Board resolutions, Minutes, and Board Briefing Materials.

The Register tracks redactions from Board resolutions, Minutes, and Board Briefing Materials from August 2016. In addition to tracking the redactions by date and meeting, the Register also identifies the subject and/or topic of the redacted materials, the reasoning behind the redaction and a determination on whether said redaction is subject to an annual review to determine if the information can be published at a later time. ICANN org's practice in performing this annual review and release of information is discussed in the Guidelines for the Posting of Board Briefing Materials. When information is released, the Register will be updated to reflect the date of that release.

Some items on the Register are identified as not subject to annual review, such as contact information or other confidential employment information. The Guidelines for the Posting of Board Briefing Materials provide additional information on the propriety of keeping certain information shielded from disclosure.

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."