ICANN Terms

Glossary of terms commonly used by the ICANN Community

Actors/Roles

• NIC – A network information center manages a registry and contracts with the registrars accredited to sell domains under a given TLD.
• Registrant – A person who has registered a domain name through a registrar.
• Registrar – A company that is authorized to sell domain names.

Communities of Practice

• CCT
• GA
• GCOT
• ICANN Studienkreis
• IESG
• IRT
• JIG
• MAG
• RSTEP
• TDG
• TLG

Working Groups/Work Parties

• FFWG
• IDN WG
• PDP-WT
• PEDNR WG
• RAP WG
• VIWG
• WGIG

Task Forces

• IETF – The Internet Engineering Task Force is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.
• Whois Task Force

Draft Teams

• STI-DT

Committees

• BGC
• CEO Search Committee
• OSC
• PPSC
• SIC
• TMC

Databases

• Registry – a database of all domain names registered under a certain TLD.

Organizations

• ICANN
• ISOC – The Internet Society

Processes

• Public Comment

Programs

• Fellowship Program
• New gTLD Program – a process by which ICANN accepts applications to add new TLDs to the Root Zone.
• NextGen@ICANN

Internet Architecture

Domain Name System

• DNS – The Domain Name System translates between alphanumeric domain names and IP Addresses.
• Root Zone –

Protocols

Domain Name

• Domain Name – An identification string that represents an IP resource, such as a computer, website, or service.
• TLD – A Top Level Domain (TLD) is the last part of a domain name
• ccTLD – A Country-Code Top Level Domain is a TLD with two characters, originally designed for a particular country, sovereign state, or autonomous territory.
• gTLD – A Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) refers to any TLD that is not a ccTLD.
• IDN – An Internationalized Domain Names is formed using characters from different scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, or Devanagari. These are encoded by the Unicode standard following IDN protocol
• DNSSEC
• IP – Internet Protocol is the means by which data is sent from one computer to another via an Internet connection.
• Internet Protocol Suite
• IPv4
• IPv6

Top-Level Domain

Country code top-level domain

Internationalized Domain Name