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SSR Role & Remit

ICANN's Mission & Core Values

As stated in Section 1.1 of ICANN Bylaws, the mission of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is to "ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems".

One of ICANN's Commitments, as noted in Section 1.2 of ICANN Bylaws, is to "preserve and enhance the administration of the DNS and the operational stability, reliability, security, global interoperability, resilience, and openness of the DNS and the Internet"

ICANN's SSR Role and Remit1

Within its technical mission, ICANN's SSR role encompasses three categories of responsibilities:

  1. ICANN's operational responsibilities including L-root, DNS operations, DNSSEC key signing operations, IANA functions, gTLD system, including the introduction of new TLDs, Time Zone Database Management);
  2. ICANN's involvement as a coordinator, collaborator and facilitator with the global community in policy and technical matters related to the Internet's unique identifiers;
  3. ICANN's participation andengagement in the global Internet ecosystem.
ICANN Technical Mission

Figure 1 - ICANN's Technical Mission

Key definitions related to ICANN's Technical Mission include:

Security – the capacity to protect Internet Identifier and prevent misuse.

Stability – the capacity to ensure that the Internet Identifier Systems operate as expected, and that users of these systems have confidence that the systems operate as expected or intended.

Resiliency – the capacity of Internet Identifier Systems to effectively withstand, tolerate, or survive malicious attacks and other disruptive events without interruption or cessation of service.

Unique Identifier Health – A state of general functioning of the Internet's unique identifiers that is within nominal technical bounds in the dimensions of coherency, integrity, speed, availability, vulnerability and resiliency.

1This description was incorporated to address a Board approved recommendation resulting from the first review of ICANN's commitment to the Security, Stability and Resilience of the DNS. This review effort was conducted under the Affirmation of Commitments.

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."