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ICANN DNS Symposium 2025

As part of our commitment to delivering impactful and well-coordinated global events, ICANN has made the strategic decision to cancel the 2025 ICANN DNS Symposium (IDS), which was scheduled to take place in Africa in December 2025.

This decision reflects our broader regional engagement strategy, recognizing an already active year of events. With a full calendar of activities across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region—including ICANN84, our Annual General Meeting in Oman; the Africa DNS Forum; Africa Engagement Forum; and the Coalition for Digital Africa partners' meeting—we are focusing resources to ensure stronger alignment, greater participation, and more meaningful impact.

We encourage our stakeholders to engage with us through these and other events, explore our technical research publications, and take advantage of our capacity-building programs led by ICANN's technical engagement team operating in every region.

Thank you for your continued engagement and support.

Contact Us

Email [email protected] with "ICANN DNS Symposium" in the subject line.

IDS Archive

View IDS 2024 webpage

View IDS 2023 webpage

View IDS 2022 webpage

View IDS 2021 webpage (virtual event)

View IDS 2020 webpage (canceled event)

View IDS 2019 webpage

View IDS 2018 webpage

View IDS 2017 webpage

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."