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The ICANN offices will be closed from 24 December 2016 through 2 January 2017. We wish you and your family a happy holiday season.

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Update on ICANN Transparency Reporting

Draft Report of the Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Available in January

Cybersecurity Topics on a Whirlwind Tour of Eastern Europe: Take 2

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News and Announcements

ICANN59 Fellowship Application Round Now Open

Join us for ICANN59

lCANN launches the application round for ICANN59. This round is open only for Fellowship Program Alumni, those who have previously completed an ICANN Fellowship, as it is a Community Policy Forum. The meeting takes place from 26-29 June 2017 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Click on the link above for more information.

Successful Candidates Announced for ICANN58 Fellowship

56 Individuals from 41 countries to join us at ICANN58

56 individuals from 41 countries have been selected to participate in ICANN's Fellowship program at ICANN58 in Copenhagen, Denmark from March 11-16, 2017. Click on the link above to find out more about the individuals selected and the Fellowship Program.

Explore the Post-ICANN57 Policy Report

Post-ICANN57 Policy Report

Read the Post-ICANN57 Policy Report to learn about the work and progress made by supporting organizations and advisory committees during ICANN57. The report is now available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Click the link above to read the Post-ICANN57 Policy Report.

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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."