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

Milestone Reached

08 Apr 2016

25 ICANN Fellows Attend ICANN56 in Helsinki 27-30 June 2016

Fellowship Program Brings Experienced Alumni to ICANN56 Policy Forum

08 Apr 2016

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

Registration Now Open for Middle East DNS Forum

08 Apr 2016

Apply now ICANN56 NextGen@ICANN Program

NextGen@ICANN Application Round Open for ICANN56

08 Apr 2016

Announcements

ICANN Holds Calls with Community on Public Comments Submitted on the Draft FY17 Operating Plan and Budget

ICANN will be holding community calls during which the comments submitted on the Draft FY17 Operating Plan and Budget will be presented by the submitters to ICANN staff. This is intended to enhance the understanding of the comments and so improve...

12 Apr 2016

ICANN and Verisign Announce Start of 90-day Root Zone Management System "Parallel Testing" Period

As scheduled and previously communicated, on 6 April 2016, ICANN and Verisign began a 90-day “parallel testing” period to verify the continued integrity of the data contained in the root zone file produced via the Root Zone Management System...

08 Apr 2016  |  NTIA Stewardship Transition, DNS Marketplace, Technology

Fellowship Program Brings Experienced Alumni to ICANN56 Policy Forum

Twenty-five Alumni with previous Fellowship and ICANN Community experience have been selected to participate in ICANN's Policy Forum at the 56th Public Meeting in Helsinki, 27-30 June 2016. These individuals represent all sectors of society...

04 Apr 2016  |  Developing World, Announcement

GDD Summit Announced

ICANN's second Global Domains Division (GDD) Industry Summit will be held 17-19 May 2016 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The three-day event is intended to provide contracted parties with the opportunity to meet and address issues of shared...

04 Apr 2016  |  gTLD, DNS Marketplace

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Multimedia

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Interview with Jia-Rong Low on ICANN Day in China

Interview with Jia-Rong Low, VP and MD of ICANN APAC Hub, on the inaugural China ICANN Day, filmed in Beijing in March 2016.

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Interview with GAC Representative Tracy Hackshaw During ICANN53

Interview with GAC Representative Tracy Hackshaw from Trinidad and Tobago, filmed in June 2015 in Buenos Aires

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ICANN55 Wrap Up Interview With Atallah And Crocker

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...

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Interview With Katrina Sataki ccNSO Chair At ICANN55

Interview With Katrina Sataki ccNSO Chair At ICANN55

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Blog Posts

Building an Enhanced, Community Empowered ICANN

  |   By Akram Atallah

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ICANN at RightsCon Silicon Valley

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

Conduct at ICANN Meetings

  |   By Akram Atallah

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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."