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Chair’s Blog: A Preview of the Kobe Board Workshop

Next Steps with the RDAP Service for gTLD Registries and Registrars

ICANN org publishes Charter on Government Engagement Approach

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ICANN Announces Successful Candidates for ICANN65 Fellowship

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ICANN is pleased to welcome 33 individuals from 31 countries selected to participate in ICANN's Fellowship program at ICANN65 in Marrakesh, Morocco from 24-27 June 2019. These successful candidates represent all sectors of society including: civil, government, ccTLD operations, academia, business community, technical, security, and end-user groups.

Pre-ICANN64 Policy Report Now Available

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The Pre-ICANN64 Policy Report provides a high-level overview of the planned work and activities of the Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) at ICANN64. Click on the link above to learn more about what to expect at the Community Forum in Kobe, Japan.

ICANN64 Edition of the GNSO Policy Briefing Now Available

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The GNSO Policy Briefing is prepared specifically for ICANN meetings. The Briefing provides the ICANN community with concise background information on all relevant GNSO policy efforts. Click on the link above to learn more about the GNSO during ICANN64.

ICANN org publishes Charter on Government Engagement Approach

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ICANN org has published a charter titled, "ICANN Organization Engagement with Governments and Standards Bodies." The approach will be limited to providing technical information on issues, regulations, and legislative efforts that impact ICANN's Mission or Articles of Incorporation. Learn more.

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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."