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ICANN's Duncan Burns, Senior Vice President of Communications, sits down with ICANN President and CEO Göran Marby and ICANN Chair Steve Crocker to discuss the past week at ICANN56's Policy Forum in Helsinki, Finland. View the video to learn more!

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Blog Update: BGC's Comments on Recent Reconsideration Request

  |   By Chris Disspain

Inviting You to ICANN57 in Hyderabad!

  |   By Jia-Ring Low, Vice President of Global Stakeholder Engagement in Asia, and Managing Director of the ICANN Asia Pacific Hub

What Do You Think of the First Policy Forum?

  |   By Tanzanica King

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News and Announcements

The Internet Needs You

ICANN's Newcomer Program

ICANN is looking for new global voices to lead the next generation. Learn about our Newcomer Program, more about ICANN and how to participate within the community. Click the link above to find out more.

Celebrating 200 At-Large Structures Milestone

Celebrating 200 At-Large Structures Milestone

The At-Large Community just reached an exciting milestone in its organization history – the At-Large Advisory Committee has accredited the 200th organization as an At-Large Structure (ALS). Click the link above to learn more.

Milestone Reached

NTIA Milestone

ICANN's Board Chair, Steve Crocker, reacts to U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) report on the IANA Stewardship Transition proposal. Click the link above to read the blog post.

Inviting You to ICANN57 in Hyderabad

Image of Hyderabad

ICANN57 will be held in Hyderabad, India, from 3–9 November 2016. Together with Samiran Gupta, Head of India, and the Asia Pacific Hub team, we welcome you to Hyderabad. Learn more about our upcoming ICANN57 meeting by clicking the link above to read the blog post. See you in Hyderabad!

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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."