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Press Release: ICANN86 Policy Forum Brings Global Internet Community to Seville

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Brussels – 28 May 2026 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will hold its 86th Public Meeting, the ICANN86 Policy Forum in Seville, Spain, from 8–11 June 2026 at the FIBES Conference and Exhibition Centre.

Hosted by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service, ICANN86 will bring together participants from governments, civil society, business, and the technical community to collaborate on policy, technical, and governance issues that enable the Internet to function across borders.

ICANN coordinates key technical systems that are critical to the Internet's global operation, including the Domain Name System (DNS) and Internet Protocol addresses. ICANN86, ICANN's mid-year meeting, will focus on current community work in areas including DNS Abuse mitigation, access to domain name registration data, DNS security and resilience, Universal Acceptance, Internationalized Domain Names, and the governance of systems that support the global coordination of Internet number resources.

While technical, these issues have a broad impact on the Internet, and the 6 billion people who use it. They shape how the Internet remains secure and stable, how abuse can be addressed, how to expand multilingual access, and how the Internet continues to function as a single, globally interoperable system.

"ICANN86 comes at a time of growing attention to how the Internet is coordinated and how key technical systems operate across borders," said Kurtis Lindqvist, ICANN President and CEO. "That makes ICANN's consensus-based, multistakeholder model all the more important. In Seville, the community will continue its work on the technical and policy issues within ICANN's remit through processes that help keep the Internet stable, secure, and globally interoperable."

During ICANN86, ICANN's Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees will continue their work on policy development and advice on issues within ICANN's remit. ICANN has also invited students and young professionals to engage with the community through NextGen@ICANN and the ICANN Fellowship program. Sessions of note include the Governmental Advisory Committee Opening Plenary, the DNS Security Extensions Security Workshop, and a DNS Women session.

"Spain is pleased to welcome ICANN and its community to Seville for the ICANN86 Public Meeting," said Ms. María González Veracruz, Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service. "We are proud to host this global gathering and the discussions on coordinating the systems that help keep the Internet working and people connected."

ICANN86 will be ICANN's second Public Meeting in Spain, after Barcelona in 2018.

The meeting will be held in hybrid format, offering both in-person and remote participation. In-person registration is open now and will close on Sunday, 7 June 2026. Remote registration will remain available through the end of the meeting.

 

For more information and to register, visit the ICANN86 meeting webpage.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.

Media Contact

Luna Madi
Senior Director, Global Communications (EMEA)
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
Mobile: +90 (533) 031 35 05
Email: [email protected]
or [email protected]

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."