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27 April 2016 for an update on ICANN’s activities, progress & financials during FY16 Q3 (period ending 31 March 2016). If you have an interest in ICANN, we encourage you to participate. The call is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian & Spanish. Please register to receive participation instructions.

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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

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News and Announcements

Milestone Reached

Plan to Transition Stewardship of Key Internet Functions Sent to the U.S. Government

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. Want to learn more? Click the link above.

Registration Now Open for Middle East DNS Forum

Middle East DNS Forum 4-5 May 2016 Tunis, Tunisa

Join ICANN at the Middle East DNS Forum on 4-5 May 2016 in Tunis. A key focus of the forum will be to discuss the status of the Internet industry and the domain name market in the Middle East & North Africa, exploring both the opportunities and challenges businesses, entrepreneurs and Internet users face. Click the link above to register.

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.

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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."