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Contacts | ICANN News | Subscribe and Follow | Media Assets | Leader Bios

About ICANN | Strategic Initiatives | Additional Resources

Contacts

General Media Inquiries: press@icann.org

Region-specific Inquiries:

Asia Pacific: Liana Teo, Singapore, liana.teo@icann.org, +65 9113 2001
Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Luna Madi, Istanbul, Turkey, luna.madi@icann.org, +90 533 0313505
The Americas: Alexandra Dans, Montevideo, Uruguay, alexandra.dans@icann.org, +598 95 831 442

ICANN News

Press Releases

  • Read the latest ICANN Press Releases.

Announcements and Blogs

  • Read the latest ICANN Announcements.
  • Read the latest ICANN Blogs.

Subscribe and Follow

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ICANN Newsletters

ICANN Social Media

  • Follow the latest ICANN activities on social media. Details and links can be found here at our social media hub.

Media Assets

  • Download ICANN logos, images, and infographics.

Leader Bios

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.

ICANN's vision is to be a champion of the single, open, and globally interoperable Internet, by being the independent, trusted, multistakeholder steward of the Internet's unique identifiers, and by providing an open and collaborative environment where diverse stakeholders come together in the global public interest.

ICANN Locations

ICANN org is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, USA.

ICANN org has regional offices in:

  • Brussels, Belgium
  • Singapore
  • Istanbul, Turkey
  • Montevideo, Uruguay

ICANN has engagement centers in:

  • Beijing, China
  • Nairobi, Kenya.
  • Geneva, Switzerland
  • Washington, D.C., USA

More information is available here.

Strategic Initiatives

ICANN is focused on several strategic initiatives that impact the stability, security, and interoperability of the Internet.

More information on these initiatives is outlined in the ICANN Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2021-2025.

Additional Resources

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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."