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Groups

ICANN Organizational Chart

Because ICANN tackles complex problems, it depends on the support of many different types of groups and sub-structures: Advisory Committees, Supporting Organizations, standing committees, working groups, review teams, task forces, and more.

This page provides a starting point for finding work product (such as minutes, resolutions, and reports) from various structures within ICANN. You'll also find background on some groups, and links to the web pages of various groups.

Click in the left navigation column, or on the headings below, to visit the following resources.

Board. Pictures and bios of current and former Directors; information on Board committees; Board Statements of Interest, and more.

ASO. Official website of the Address Supporting Organization.

ALAC. Official website of the At-Large Advisory Committee and the At-Large community, the voice of the individual user in ICANN.

ccNSO. Official website of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization.

GAC. Official website of the Governmental Advisory Committee.

GNSO. Official website of the Generic Names Supporting Organization.

IETF. Specifies the formal communication channel between ICANN and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

NomCom. Web page for the Nominating Committee, an independent group tasked with selecting eight members of the ICANN Board of Directors and other key positions.

RSSAC. Web page dedicated to the Root Server System Advisory Committee, recording their meetings and formal statements.

SSAC. Official web page of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee.

Technical Liaison Group. Links related to this group, which connects the ICANN Board with appropriate technical advice on specific pertinent matters.

Other Groups. Links to the IDN Variants Working Group, the Technical Relations Working Group, the CEO Search Committee, and other presidential committees and Board working groups as they form.

Past Groups. Links to committees and task forces that are currently closed, listed in reverse chronological order from 2010 back to 1998.

Organizational Reviews. Information related to periodic reviews of the performance and operation of each Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee.

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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."