Skip to main content

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.

Learn More

Quicklinks

Blog Posts

ICANN at RightsCon Silicon Valley

  |   By Rafik Dammak, NCUC Chair, and Adam Peake, ICANN Civil Society Engagement

Conduct at ICANN Meetings

  |   By Akram Atallah

Contributing to Sustainable Development Goals

  |   By Jia-Rong Low, Vice President and Managing Director, ICANN Asia Pacific

BROWSE ALL BLOG POSTS

News and Announcements

NextGen@ICANN Application Round Open for ICANN56

Apply now ICANN56 NextGen@ICANN Program

With the announcement of ICANN56 relocation to Helsinki, Finland the application round to participate in the NextGen@ICANN Program at Meeting B* in June 2016 is now open. This round remains open until 18 April 2016 and successful candidates will be announced on the ICANN website, 2 May 2016. Please click the link above for more information.

Watch the ICANN55 Wrap Up Interview

Image of Steve Crocker, Akram Atallah and Luna Madi

ICANN's Luna Madi sat down with interim ICANN President & CEO Akram Atallah and ICANN Board Chair Steve Crocker to talk about ICANN's historic week. They discussed the community's extraordinary effort in developing the plan to Transition Stewardship of Key Internet Functions sent to the U.S. Government. Click the link above to watch the interview.

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.

View all
Home groups
ICANN Groups

We depend on the support of many different types of groups and sub-structures: Advisory Commitees, Supporting Organizations, standingcommittees, working groups, review teams, task forces, and more.

Explore all Groups

A note about tracking cookies:

This site is using "tracking cookies" on your computer to deliver the best experience possible. Read more to see how they are being used.

This notice is intended to appear only the first time you visit the site on any computer.Dismiss

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."