Skip to main content

ICANN70 Update

The ICANN70 Community Forum will be held as a Virtual Public Meeting. The meeting will take place during the modified dates from 22-25 March 2021. Read the full announcement for additional information.

Learn more

Quicklinks

Blog Posts

Chair’s Blog: Recap of the January Remote Board Workshop

DAAR Activity Project: Now Providing Personalized Monthly Reports for ccTLDs

Chair’s Blog: The Year Ahead and a Preview of the January Workshop

BROWSE ALL BLOG POSTS

News and Announcements

ICANN Issues Third Breach Notice to Net 4 India

Thumb net 4 india feature

To protect the rights and interests of domain name registrants, ICANN has issued a third breach notice against Net 4 India Limited (Net 4 India) for its repeated and ongoing failures to comply with the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA). Click the title to learn more.

2021 Nominating Committee (NomCom) Extends Deadline to 29 March

Thumb nomcom feature 01

The ICANN 2021 NomCom has extended the deadline for ICANN leadership applications to 29 March 2021 at 23:59 UTC. The NomCom invites interested individuals to apply for key leadership positions within ICANN. Click the title above to learn more and how to apply.

ICANN70 Prep Week Schedule Now Available

Thumb icann70 prep sessionsfeature

ICANN has published the ICANN70 Prep Week schedule to help the community for the upcoming ICANN70 Virtual Community Forum, which will be held 22-25 March 2021. Prep Week will consist of 10 sessions from 8-11 March 2021. To attend any sessions, please register for ICANN70. Click the title above to learn more.

Changes Coming to Registry Reports on ICANN’s Open Data

Thumb odp banner 03 cc 295x168 1

Beginning on 15 March 2021, ICANN’s Open Data will become the permanent home of Registry Reports. With this change, these reports will no longer be available on https://icann.org as of 15 March 2021. ICANN org is providing this update to inform the community of these upcoming changes. Click the title to learn more.

View all

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."