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ICANN Strategic Plan

Introduction to Strategic Planning

The purpose of strategic planning is to set out the long-term objectives for the organization, reflecting the ICANN mission and vision. Strategic planning is a fundamental part of ICANN's governance, mandated by the Bylaws.

Strategic planning is a core element of ICANN's three-fold planning process, namely the Five-Year Strategic Plan, the Five-Year Operating Plan, and the Annual Operating Plan and Budget. Strategic planning helps answer two very important questions: Where are we now, and where do we want to be?

Current ICANN Strategic Plan

ICANN is currently operating under the ICANN Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2026–2030. The current Strategic Plan is available in the six ICANN Languages:

The ICANN Board of Directors adopted the current Strategic Plan on 13 March 2025, and it went into effect on 1 July 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."