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ICANN Press Releases | 2025

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2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022

Press Release: ICANN To Address Future of Digital Identity and Fragmentation Threats at Web Summit

LOS ANGELES – 6 November 2025

Press Release: Tripti Sinha Reappointed Board Chair and Sajid Rahman Appointed Vice Chair of ICANN Board of Directors

DUBLIN – 30 October 2025

Press Release: ICANN84 in Dublin: A Pivotal Moment for the Future of the Internet

DUBLIN – 15 October 2025

Press Release: What Holds the Internet Together and Why It's Now at Risk

Prague – 10 June 2025

Press Release: ICANN83 Policy Forum Set for Prague Amid Key Milestones

PRAGUE – 28 May 2025

Press Release: New Research Reveals Marketing Leaders See Strong Potential in gTLDs Despite Knowledge Gap

LOS ANGELES – 20 May 2025

Press Release: ICANN DNS Forum in Hanoi: Leaders Convene to Shape the Multilingual Internet

Hanoi, VIET NAM – 28 April 2025

Press Release: Internet Access: UNESCO and ICANN Join Forces to Improve Linguistic Diversity Online

PARIS and LOS ANGELES – 27 February 2025

Press Release: Advancing a Strong, Stable Internet Together: ICANN82 Community Forum in Seattle

LOS ANGELES – 18 February 2025

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."