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ICANN at RightsCon Silicon Valley

By Rafik Dammak, NCUC Chair, and Adam Peake, ICANN Civil Society Engagement | 28 Mar 2016

  • Conduct at ICANN Meetings

    During and after ICANN55 the issue of certain community-member conduct toward one another has been raised in various sessions and lists. I wanted to re-confirm that ICANN’s staff and Board takes the issue of harassment or other improper conduct at its meetings very...

    25 Mar 2016 | By Akram Atallah

  • Contributing to Sustainable Development Goals

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    ICANN’s mission is to maintain a stable, secure and interoperable Internet, with a narrow scope of coordinating the Internet’s unique identifiers.The work we do in the logical layer of the Internet has socioeconomic benefits for the world. I am proud to be a part of ICANN...

    24 Mar 2016 | By Jia-Rong Low, Vice President and Managing Director, ICANN Asia Pacific

  • Lending Clarity to Security Risk Definitions - For ICANN Community and Beyond

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    In its Beijing Communiqué [PDF, 155 KB] of 11 April 2013, the ICANN Government Advisory Committee (GAC) called on ICANN to have new gTLD registry operators find and act upon a variety of abusive activities occurring within their TLDs. This led to a requirement in all new...

    17 Mar 2016 | By Dave Piscitello, VP, Security And ICT Coordinator

  • Dear Canada, The Internet NEEDS You

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    Think of the Internet's value to your business or organization; think of all the ways you rely on it. You need the Internet, but the reverse is also true -- the Internet needs you. The Internet is incredibly valuable and its governance is complex. With billions of devices...

    07 Mar 2016 | By Christopher Mondini, VP, Stakeholder Engagement, Global Business and North America Region

  • Expectations of Service Level Expectations

    Introduction Recently, ICANN staff has been working to meet the community requirements related to establishing metrics for the performance of the "Post Transition IANA" as it processes root zone management requests. For those not following the development of the...

    07 Mar 2016 | By David Conrad

  • Welcome to ICANN55 in Africa!

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    After a successful meeting in Dublin in October 2015, we began the countdown to ICANN55 in Marrakech. Three years have passed since ICANN held its last public meeting in Africa – in Durban, South Africa – and since then, the African community has been looking forward to...

    07 Mar 2016 | By Pierre Dandjinou, VP of Stakeholder Engagement for Africa

  • Top Ten Things to Do in Marrakech

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    The ancient city of Marrakech is known for its winding streets, riads (courtyards), chaotic markets and exotic architecture. Marrakech's 1700-acre Medina (old city) is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Be sure to carve out time to explore this fascinating city! Djemaa el Fna,...

    05 Mar 2016 | By

  • The Registration Operations Workshop: Join Us in Buenos Aires

    The next Registration Operations Workshop, the fourth of these events, will take place just before IETF-95 on Sunday, April 3, 2016, at the Hilton Hotel in Buenos Aires. The Registration Operations Workshop series is now being co-sponsored by Verisign and ICANN and...

    02 Mar 2016 | By David Conrad

  • The IANA Stewardship Transition: The Last Few Inches

    When ICANN was first formed in 1998, the intent was for the organization and the multistakeholder community to eventually become the stewards of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.Now, almost two years since the U.S. National Telecommunications and...

    01 Mar 2016 | By Theresa Swinehart & Akram Atallah

  • GNSO Council Chair Looks Ahead to ICANN55

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    Dear Colleagues: Welcome to Marrakech, ICANN55 – the first meeting of 2016! The new year has already been eventful for the GNSO Community. At this meeting the GNSO Council will complete its work on some important topics, while launching several new efforts for the year...

    29 Feb 2016 | By James Bladel

  • Business Engagement Guest Blogger Series: Chris Wilson

    Within ICANN are numerous structures and constituencies that provide a voice for private sector stakeholders. Among the most active is the Business Users Constituency of the Generic Names Supporting Organization. For the first in a series of blogs from business...

    26 Feb 2016 | By Christopher Mondini

  • Volume 13: An Update on IANA Stewardship Discussions

    Transition another step closer as accountability proposal is sent to Chartering Organizations The final CCWG-Accountability proposal for accountability enhancements that must be in place or committed to within the timeframe of the IANA Stewardship Transition has been sent...

    26 Feb 2016 | By Samantha Dickinson

  • Helping the Community Develop Policies

    As part of our ongoing efforts to encourage members of the regional Internet community to participate, LACNIC has introduced a variety of new instruments to help the community develop and modify policies implemented in Latin America and the Caribbean. The initiatives,...

    25 Feb 2016 | By By Gianina Pensky, Policy Officer, LACNIC and María Gayo, Communications Manager, LACNIC

  • A New Approach to an ICANN Institution: The Public Forum

    Anyone who has ever attended an ICANN meeting knows that they are all about personal engagement. Our meetings represent a chance for community members to directly and personally engage one another, the staff and the community selected Board. Nowhere is this attitude of...

    24 Feb 2016 | By Steve Crocker

  • ICANN55 Marrakech – Global Domains Division Session Highlights

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    ICANN55 is right around the corner! The Global Domains Division (GDD) will be holding over 20 sessions to ensure that community stakeholders have the latest information on our work and an opportunity to give us feedback. Monday, 7 March 2016, is a big day for our...

    24 Feb 2016 | By Akram Atallah

  • CCWG-Accountability Delivers Report to Chartering Organizations

    Today, the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) provided its Chartering Organizations with its final supplemental report on Work Stream 1 recommendations. [You can download the full report here] The report is the result of...

    23 Feb 2016 | By CCWG-Accountability co-Chairs

  • What is Privilege Escalation?

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    In my previous post, we examined the measures that organizations use to enforce authorization policies. Authorization policies and the methods we use to enforce them – access controls, user permissions or privileges – are intended to protect sensitive information against...

    18 Feb 2016 | By Dave Piscitello

  • WHOIS 2015 Annual Report Highlights Recent Accomplishments

    2015 was a banner year for ICANN in the area of WHOIS improvements. Today, ICANN published the 2015 Annual Report [PDF, 1.06 MB], which showcases those achievements and describes ICANN's progress against the recommendations from the 2012 Review Team. ICANN is also...

    05 Feb 2016 | By Karen Mulberry

  • BGC's Comments on Recent Reconsideration Request

    During its meetings on 13 January and 1 February 2016, ICANN's Board Governance Committee (BGC) considered a Request for Reconsideration filed by dotgay LLC. This request asked us to reconsider the outcome of a Community Priority Evaluation (CPE), which resulted in dotgay...

    03 Feb 2016 | By Chris Disspain, Chair, BGC

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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."