ICANN Terms

The following terms are commonly used by the ICANN Community.

Actors/Roles[edit | edit source]

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.
ICANN Fellow – A member of the Internet community and recipient of a grant provided by the ICANN Fellowship Program.

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

ADR – an Alternative Dispute Resolution is a process for helping parties under dispute resolve their argument without filing any litigation.
Public Comment

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

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

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