ICANN Terms
Glossary of terms commonly used by the ICANN Community
Actors/Roles edit
- 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 edit
Working Groups/Work Parties edit
Task Forces edit
- 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 edit
Committees edit
Databases edit
Documents edit
Organizations edit
Processes edit
Programs edit
- Fellowship Program
- New gTLD Program – a process by which ICANN accepts applications to add new TLDs to the Root Zone.
- NextGen@ICANN
Internet Architecture edit
Domain Name System edit
- DNS – The Domain Name System translates between alphanumeric domain names and IP Addresses.
- Root Zone –
Protocols edit
Domain Name edit
- 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