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Press Release: ICANN Launches Caribbean Premiere of ICANN Near You in Guyana

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MONTEVIDEO – 28 January 2026 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) invites the Caribbean Internet community to participate in the first ICANN Near You event for the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. The event will take place from 3 to 5 February 2026 in Georgetown, Guyana. The inaugural event offers an accessible and responsive approach to addressing region-specific technical and Internet governance needs.

Hosted in collaboration with the University of Guyana and the Internet Society, the three-day program brings ICANN's technical expertise directly to local stakeholders to help address challenges related to the local identifier system. The University of Guyana plays a central role in the country's Internet ecosystem, hosting Guyana's Internet Exchange Point as well as the country code top-level domain name, .gy. The agenda includes hands-on workshops on the Domain Name System (DNS), Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and security best practices for Internet service providers and network operators, aimed at strengthening local technical capacity and enhancing the resilience of Guyana's Internet infrastructure.

"The Caribbean premiere of ICANN Near You in Guyana reflects the strong regional and national collaboration that makes the multistakeholder model work," said Rodrigo de la Parra, ICANN Vice President for Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. "We are grateful for the active participation of the Secretariat of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Office of the Prime Minister of Guyana, as well as the contributions of community leaders such as Lance Hinds, Chair of LACRALO, and Internet governance expert Claire Craig, participating through ICANN's Community Regional Outreach Program (CROP). Their leadership and support underscore a shared commitment to strengthening technical capacity and Internet resilience across Guyana and the wider Caribbean."

The event will feature sessions highlighting how stakeholders across Guyana, from students to government officials, can contribute to a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. In addition, ICANN representatives will share practical ways with local law enforcement and government agencies to address DNS Abuse and demonstrate how Guyanese stakeholders can further engage with ICANN's multistakeholder process.

Participating in ICANN Near You in Guyana is free and open to all. The event will be held at the University of Guyana. For additional details and to register, please visit the registration page.

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.

Media Contacts

Alexandra Dans
Communications Director, The Americas
Montevideo, Uruguay
Tel. +598 95 831 442
alexandra.dans@icann.org
or press@icann.org

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."