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Reviews are one of several important ICANN accountability mechanisms. Organizational Reviews and Specific Reviews (formerly AoC Reviews) provide the means for independent assessment of ICANN’s performance toward its commitments.

Reviews are a progress report that demonstrates how ICANN delivers on its commitments and identifying areas for improvement.  Reviews promote a common goal: a single, interoperable Internet supported by stable, secure and resilient unique identifier systems.  This allows the Internet to be free and open and will help shape the future of the World Wide Web.

Projected Timeline of Upcoming Reviews

The timing of reviews is defined by ICANN Bylaws. Reviews are on a five year cycle.

 

Final Organizational Reviews Reports Prepared by Independent Examiners

Review Prepared By Final Report Report Date
At-Large Westlake Consulting Limited Arabic  Chinese  English  French  Spanish 25 July 2008
At-Large2 ITEMS International English 2 May 2017
ASO ITEMS International English December 2011
ccNSO ITEMS International Arabic  Chinese  English  French  Russian Spanish 15 June 2010
GNSO London School of Economics English September 2006
GNSO2 Westlake Governance Limited Arabic  Chinese  English  French  Russian Spanish 15 September 2015
NomCom Interisle Consulting Group, LLC English 23 October 2007
RSSAC Westlake Consulting Limited English March 2009
SSAC JAS Communications LLC English 15 May 2009

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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."