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Internet Identifier System Research and Security, Stability, and Resiliency

Office of the Chief Technology Officer supports improving the Security, Stability, and Resiliency of Internet’s system of unique identifiers; researches issues related to those identifiers; provides capacity building training for DNS, DNSSEC, and Security; participates in technical and security community groups (IETF, regional TLDs, AntiPhishing).

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Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Functions

Part of ICANN Operational functions include the maintenance or key Global Registries (Protocol Parameters, Top level IP number Prefixes and Top level Domain name delegation) under the IANA functions, and the Time Zone Database which contains the code and data that represents local time around the globe.

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Information Systems, Corporate Security, IT and DNS Engineering

Office of the Chief Information Officer monitors and maintains ICANN systems and technical operations, corporate security, and Information Technology. The DNS Engineering Team administers ICANN's DNS network services and the global L-root constellation.

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Global Domain Division Technical Services

The Global Domains Division supports gTLD Registries and Registrars under contract with ICANN. This includes contracting for Emergency Backend Registry Operator, Registry and Registrar Data Escrow, operating the CZDS, and Registry Services Evaluation Process. Also supports IDNs, ccTLD Fast Track Process, Root Zone Label Generation Ruleset.

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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."