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Our ICANN57 Annual General meeting starts 3-9 November in Hyderabad. This seven-day meeting focuses on outreach, capacity building & engaging with a broader global audience. Unable to attend? Participate remotely. Our schedule is available on our meeting website.

View the ICANN57 Schedule

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Research Revealed on Authoritative Servers at the Second Level

KSK Rollover Operations Begin

ICANN57: A Real-Life Audio-Video Disaster Recovery Story

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Review the Pre-ICANN57 Policy Report

Pre-ICANN57 Annual General Meeting Report

Read the Pre-ICANN57 Policy Report to learn what to expect from each Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee during ICANN57. Along with background information and ICANN57 session details. Click the link above to start preparing for the meeting.

Read the GNSO’s ICANN57 Policy Briefing

GNSO Policy Briefing ICANN57 Edition

Learn what to expect at the ICANN57 meeting with the Generic Names Supporting Organization's Policy Briefing for ICANN57. How to get involved in the GNSO and their current projects. Find out the status of each project, background and how you can learn more. Click the link above to read the ICANN57 Policy Briefing.

ICANN58 NextGen@ICANN Application Round Now Open

ICANN58 NextGen@ICANN Application Round

ICANN launches the application round for those interested in participating at the ICANN58 meeting through the NextGen Program. The meeting will be held 11-16 March 2017. This round remains open until 4 November 2016 & successful candidates will be announced on the ICANN website, icann.org, 2 December 2016. Click on the link above to learn more.

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We depend on the support of many different types of groups and sub-structures: Advisory Commitees, Supporting Organizations, standingcommittees, working groups, review teams, task forces, and 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."