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ICANN Strategy Panels

Announced at the ICANN 47 meeting in Durban, South Africa, ICANN Strategy Panels served as an integral part of a framework for cross-community dialogue on strategic matters. Designed to conduct work in critical strategic areas identified by the community [PDF, 209 KB], Board and staff, the ICANN Strategy Panels built on public input being generated to inform the new, overarching vision and five-year strategic plan, and subsequent operating plan, for the organization.

Advisory in nature, the ICANN Strategy Panels operated in a manner consistent with ICANN's commitment to transparency and accountability and served to channel all views, guidance and advice produced into the standard community and Board processes that guide ICANN's activities (see illustration). A video interview with Theresa Swinehart, Senior Advisor to the President on Strategy, is available here for more information.

Prior to being factored into ICANN's strategic and/or operating plans, panel output was posted for public comment and community discussions online and at ICANN meetings.

ICANN Strategy Panels posted their final reports in May 2014.

Click on the ICANN Strategy Panels below to see Strategy Panels' key deliverables, composition, reports, videos as well as public comment and meeting archives.

ICANN Strategy Panel on ICANN Multistakeholder Innovation

ICANN Strategy Panel on the Public Responsibility Framework

ICANN Strategy Panel on Identifier Technology Innovation

ICANN Strategy Panel on ICANN's Role in the Internet Governance Ecosystem

Strategy Panel on ICANN Multistakeholder Innovation

Links to ICANN Announcements & Blog Posts

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."