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

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LOS ANGELES – 18 February 2025 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will hold its 82nd Public Meeting, the ICANN82 Community Forum, from 8 to 13 March 2025 in Seattle, Washington. ICANN Community Forums provide an excellent occasion for stakeholders around the world to engage in important discussions on policies related to the Internet's naming and numbering systems, which are the backbone of a stable, secure, and interoperable Internet.

"The ICANN Community Forum provides a unique opportunity to experience the multistakeholder model of Internet governance in action—a model that is essential for fostering collaboration, accountability, and transparency across borders and that has been essential to the success and resilience of the global Internet ecosystem," said Kurtis Lindqvist, ICANN President and CEO. "ICANN's bottom-up approach ensures that as the Internet grows, it remains resilient and globally accessible."

The Forum enables diverse stakeholders—from civil society to the private sector and governments—to work together through shared decision-making. Among the topics to be discussed at ICANN82 are digital inclusivity, the expansion of the Domain Name System, and the security and stability of the Internet.

The Community Excellence Award

Continuing its tradition of recognizing outstanding community member contributions, the Community Excellence Award will be presented on the first day of the Forum. This award recognizes ICANN community members who have deeply invested in consensus-based solutions and contributed substantively to the ICANN multistakeholder model.

Registration

All attendees must register to participate. Registration is free and closes on 7 March. On-site registration is not possible. Remote participation is also available. For details, and to register, please visit the ICANN82 Community Forum website.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems. 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.

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."