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Our FY16 Q3 call has come to a close. Catch up on all of ICANN’s activities, progress & financials during the period ending 31 March 2016. Recordings from the call are now available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. Additional materials will be available shortly.

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Blog Posts

May 9: Celebrating Europeans' Role in the Evolution of the Internet

  |   By Jean-Jacques Sahel, Vice-President, Europe (Global Stakeholder Engagement)

ICANN56, the New Meeting Format, and What that Means to You

  |   By Nicholas Tomasso

APAC Space Moves Beyond ICANN Meetings

  |   By Joyce Chen, GSE Strategy & Development, Senior Manager

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News and Announcements

Don't Miss Our Webinar on ICANN's Bylaws Amendment Process!

Join us: Webinar 9 May 2016 at 23:00 UTC

As part of the Strategic Plan LAC/LACRALO 2016, the first Capacity Building Webinar entitled "ICANN's Bylaws Amendment Process" will be held on 9 May 2016 at 23:00 UTC for 60 minutes. Our invited speaker is Theresa Swinehart, Senior Vice President, Multistakeholder Strategy and Strategic Initiatives at ICANN. Click the link above to learn more.

Successful NextGen applicants will participate at ICANN56

NextGen Announcement

15 individuals from various Universities in Europe will participate with ICANN Community Members at the ICANN56 Policy Forum in Helsinki. 5 additional NextGen Alumi will serve as Ambassadors for these newcomers to ICANN. Click the link above to learn more.

Interested in ICANN Policymaking?

POLICYmaking in the ICANN Community

With the ICANN56 Policy Forum in Helsinki just around the corner, we’re pleased to share our new ASO, ccNSO and GNSO policymaking infographic. Download the infographic, available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish, by clicking the link above. And see you in Finland 27-30 June 2016.

Milestone Reached

Plan to Transition Stewardship of Key Internet Functions Sent to the U.S. Government

ICANN Board Chair, Dr. Stephen D. Crocker submits to the U.S. Government a plan developed by the international Internet community that, if approved, will lead to global stewardship of some key technical Internet functions. Want to learn more? Click the link above.

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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."