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Strategic Outlook Trends Program

Strategic Outlook Program

The purpose of the annual Strategic Outlook Program is to identify new trends or shifts in existing trends that may affect ICANN's plans. The Strategic Outlook Program takes place every year except during the development of a new five-year ICANN Strategic Plan. The program has three phases:

Trend Identification: ICANN's Planning function organizes sessions for stakeholders from across the ICANN ecosystem to identify the trends that affect ICANN and its ability to fulfill its mission. Community participation is essential to the success of this process.

Trend Analysis: The Board analyzes and verifies the trends using publicly available information and expert input.

Trend Impact Assessment: The Board assesses the risks, opportunities, and potential effects on ICANN of the trends to inform the development of the annual Operating Plan and Budget. In the case of significant new trends, the Board may recommend adjustments to the Five-Year Operating Plan or to the Strategic Plan.

On 26 October 2023, after considering the FY25 Strategic Outlook Trend Report, the Board resolved to keep the ICANN Strategic Plan for FY21–25 in force and unchanged.

FY25 Strategic Outlook Trends Data:

Trend Identification:

Trends Analysis and Impact Assessment:

Strategic Outlook Trend Report:

FY24 Strategic Outlook Trends Data:

Trend Identification:

Trends Analysis and Impact Assessment:

Strategic Outlook Trend Report

FY23 Strategic Outlook Trends Data:

Trend Identification:

Trends Analysis and Impact Assessment:

Strategic Outlook Trend Report

FY22 Strategic Outlook Trends Data:

Trend Identification:

Trends Analysis and Impact Assessment:

Strategic Outlook Trend Report

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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."