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Resources

Employee Anonymous Hotline Policy and Procedures (Whistleblower)

The ICANN organization (org) is committed to the highest possible standards of ethical, moral, and legal business conduct. ICANN org has several policies, including Open-Door, Prohibition of Harassment, and Fraud, that provide ICANN org employees with procedures for reporting work-related concerns. ICANN org provides an Anonymous Hotline as an additional resource for employees to report issues, in good faith, regarding unethical, illegal, or unsafe activity. Employees can use the Anonymous Hotline to report issues directly to an independent external agency staffed with trained professionals, who are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The independent external agency will notify the Hotline Committee of all issues reported to the Anonymous Hotline. The policy and procedures are contained within the Anonymous Hotline policy and procedures documents. These policy and procedures may also be known as Whistleblower Protections.

Anonymous Hotline Policy

Procedures for Handling Reports to ICANN's Anonymous Hotline

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."