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Milestone Reached

ICANN Board Chair, Dr. Stephen D. Crocker submits to the U.S. Government a plan developed by the international Internet community that, if approved, will lead to global stewardship of some key technical Internet functions.

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Dear Canada, The Internet NEEDS You

  |   By Christopher Mondini, VP, Stakeholder Engagement, Global Business and North America Region

Expectations of Service Level Expectations

  |   By David Conrad

Welcome to ICANN55 in Africa!

  |   By Pierre Dandjinou, VP of Stakeholder Engagement for Africa

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News and Announcements

Interview with Nominating Committee Leadership

Screenshot from Video

Meet several of the Nominating Committee's (NomCom) Chairs in this interview during ICANN55 and learn about the current application round for key leadership roles at ICANN. The deadline is 20 March 2016. Watch the video to learn more.

Watch Fadi Chehadé's Tribute Video

Image of Fadi Chehadé

This tribute video to Fadi Chehadé features statements from Steve Crocker, Nii Quaynor, Vint Cerf, Akram Atallah, Lawrence Strickling, Cheryl Langdon-Orr and Olivier Crepin-Leblond. Click the link above to start watching.

Final Report on “Middle East DNS Study” Released

Final Report on the Domain Name System for the MEAC now Published

The publication of the final report on the Domain Name System (DNS) for the Middle East and Adjoining Countries (MEAC) or the “Middle East DNS Study” was completed after receiving feedback on the initial draft. The report will be discussed at ICANN55 during the DNS Industry in the Middle East session on Tuesday, 8 March from 1630-1800 WET.

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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."