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Countdown To ICANN 52- ICANN And The Year Ahead

Fadi Chehadé, ICANN President and CEO, sends his Happy New Year wishes to the community for 2015 and looks forward to ICANN 52 and beyond in this message.

This year’s focus will be strengthening ICANN’s operational excellence and capabilities to deliver our mission to the world. This will be accomplished through quarterly reporting, further equipping and investing in our staff, and measuring organizational progress against a clear baseline.

The IANA stewardship transition will be at the forefront this year as a test of the multistakeholder model by which ICANN operates and as a test of our community. It is important to remember that IANA encompasses not only the technical functions of that department but also the people who support its critical operations. In this spirit, we recognize the 15th anniversary of team member Michelle Cotton and her longstanding, dedicated service with ICANN.

We hope to see you in Singapore!

More Multimedia
2021 ICANN Community Excellence Award
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Welcome To The ICANN70 Virtual Community Forum
(English Subtitles) 2020 Dr. Tarek Kamel Award For Capacity Building

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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."