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Press Release: Gateway to Internet Governance Community, ICANN Fellowship Program Turns 15

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LOS ANGELES – 13 June 2022 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) marks the 15th anniversary of its flagship ICANN Fellowship Program, which has served as a gateway to participation in the Internet governance community for more than 800 fellows from 160 countries/territories. Launched in 2007 by ICANN, the international nonprofit that coordinates the Domain Name System and plays a key role in ensuring a global, interoperable, and secure Internet, the Fellowship introduces individuals from underserved and underrepresented communities from around the world to ICANN and the Internet governance community.

Fifteen years after its launch, the numbers highlight the enduring success of the ICANN Fellowship Program: More than 100 former fellows currently hold positions across the ICANN community and many more remain engaged within the broader Internet governance space. The goal of the program is for fellows to become active members of the ICANN community, thereby strengthening the diversity of the multistakeholder model that forms the bedrock of ICANN's technical Internet governance approach. It ensures that all relevant actors, from business, government, civil society, and other areas, work together in ICANN's consensus-driven policy-making process to maintain an open, secure, and resilient Internet. Through personal mentors and trainings fellows get acquainted with ICANN's multistakeholder model enabling them to participate in the technical Internet governance community.

"That many former fellows, all across the world, remain active members of the ICANN community speaks to the success of the Fellowship Program," said Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO. "Their dedication to ICANN's mission of preserving an Internet that is stable, secure, and global invigorates the ICANN community."

ICANN Fellowships are awarded to selected applicants in conjunction with the three annual public meetings hosted by ICANN in different locations around the world. Fellows come from diverse backgrounds but have a shared interest in learning about Internet governance and ICANN's multistakeholder model.

"As the ICANN Fellowship Program turns 15, I am delighted that it has achieved the goals set a decade and a half ago," said Maarten Botterman, ICANN Board Chair. "As it continues to evolve to meet future needs, I am confident that the program will keep providing opportunities for individuals from underserved and underrepresented communities to join the ICANN community and contribute meaningfully to the future of the Internet."

For more information on the Fellowship Program and how to apply, visit the program website.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.

Media Contact

Liana Teo
Head of Communications, APAC
Singapore
Tel. +65 6816 1259
liana.teo@icann.org
or press@icann.org

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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."