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ICANN55 Marrakech hotel booking links are now open! ICANN55 will be held 5-10 March 2016 in Marrakech, Morocco at the Palmeraie Conference Center. ICANN group hotel rates and more information about travel and visa requirements are available through the ICANN Meeting website.

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Blog Posts

LAC Capacity Building: Our LAC Regional Strategic Plan Keeps Going Forward

  |   By Alexandra Dans, Head of Communications, Latin America and the Caribbean

ICANN and the G20 Summit in Turkey

  |   By David A. Olive

Business Engagement and the IANA Stewardship Transition

  |   By Christopher Mondini

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News and Announcements

CCWG-Accountability Issues Formal Update

CCWG-Accountability Issues Formal Update with Chart

The Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) has developed a brief & preliminary overview of the proposal for improving ICANN’s accountability. The 36-page document is designed to update the community on recent progress in & after ICANN54 in Dublin. Click the link above to access the full document.

Become an ICANN Scholar

Sign up for ICANN Learn at: learn.icann.org with picture of laptop and coffee cup in background

Sign up for a course on the new ICANN Learn platform and learn about ICANN and relevant Internet topics. ICANN Learn offers courses in 6 languages including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Click the link above to begin your first ICANN Learn course today!

What’s the New ICANN Meeting Strategy?

New Meeting Strategy Image

Explore this infographic which explains the new ICANN Meetings Strategy for 2016. And don’t forget to attend the New Meeting Strategy Update in Dublin on Thursday, 22 October at 0900.

RAA Insurance Waiver Levels Playing Field

ICANN for Business Video Screenshot

The ICANN Board recently removed a barrier to registrar accreditation by waiving the requirement for Commercial General Liability insurance. The move is expected to benefit registrars in parts of South America and Africa, in particular, where Commercial General Liability insurance is difficult to find - if available at all - and very costly.

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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."