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ICANN’s Annual Strategy Review Program

ICANN's agility and adaptability depend on ICANN developing a clear five-year Strategic Plan and regularly assessing whether our Strategic Plan remains aligned with current realities.

The Annual Strategy Review program is designed to strengthen ICANN's agility and adaptability by systematically reviewing both our external environment and internal capabilities. This program provides a structured way to assess whether our Strategic Plan remains aligned with current realities.

The ICANN Board Strategic Planning Committee (BSPC) oversees this program on behalf of the Board. The program concludes with a BSPC recommendation to the Board on whether updates to the Strategic Plan are needed, to reflect changes in the external environment and ICANN's internal capability.

The Program includes:

  • Environmental Scan:
    • Highlight key internal and external trends that are relevant to ICANN
    • Facilitating brainstorming sessions with internal and external stakeholders
    • Refine the major trends documented
  • Strategic Discussion:
    • Facilitate Board-level discussion using issue-based and / or scenario-based planning
  • Decision Making:
    • The program concludes with a BSPC recommendation to the Board on whether updates to the Strategic Plan are needed, to reflect changes in the external environment and ICANN's internal capability

News and Updates

Date News and Updates
19 February 2026 Blog: Kicking Off the Annual Strategy Review: Your Voice Matters
24 February 2026 Recording: ICANN85 Prep Week - Preparing for ICANN's Annual Strategy Review
10 March 2026 Recording: ICANN85 Annual Strategy Review
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."