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.

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

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