Skip to main content
Resources

Media Resources

ICANN News | About ICANN | Subscribe and Follow | Contacts

ICANN News

  • Read the latest ICANN press releases.
  • Read the latest ICANN announcements.
  • Read the latest ICANN blogs.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.

ICANN's vision is to be a champion of the single, open, and globally interoperable Internet, by being the independent, trusted, multistakeholder steward of the Internet's unique identifiers, and by providing an open and collaborative environment where diverse stakeholders come together in the global public interest.

ICANN is a California-based nonprofit, public-benefit organization accountable to a global community of stakeholders. Its enduring mission is to ensure a stable, secure, and unified Internet. ICANN follows a multistakeholder model in which individuals, businesses, civil society, governments, and technologists play important roles in its community-based, consensus-driven, policymaking approach. Additional information and media assets are available at the resources below.

Subscribe and Follow

  • Sign up for email alerts to receive the latest ICANN blogs, announcements, Public Comment proceedings, and other updates directly to your email inbox. When new content is added or updated on our website, ICANN will send you a daily or weekly email with links to that content.
  • Subscribe to ICANN Regional Newsletters to stay up to date on the latest ICANN global and regional stories.
  • Follow the latest ICANN activities on social media

Contacts

General Media Inquiries: press@icann.org

Region-specific Inquiries:

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."