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On 6 June 2014, ICANN published a Process to Develop the Proposal and Next Steps that is the culmination of a series of community discussions and input into the process to develop a proposal to transition stewardship of the IANA functions to the global multistakeholder community. The document reflects the multitude of views expressed in different fora and calls for the establishment of, among other things, a Coordination Group.

The IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) is comprised of 30 individuals representing 13 communities, and includes direct and indirect stakeholders.

The community is encouraged to view the ICG links located in the navigation table to the right to access the most up to date information on the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group.

ICG Links Index:

  • Members: ICG member bios, headshots and video interviews
  • Documents and Calls for Input: Compiles adopted documents and calls for input
  • Meetings and Archives: Includes past and future conference call and meeting dates/times, agendas, recordings, transcripts and minutes
  • Communications: ICG correspondences, blogs and announcements
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."