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Proposed Corrections to Bylaws

To the ICANN Board and the Community:

On 31 October 2003, the ICANN Board at its public meeting in Tunis, Tunisia, discussed and resolved to effect certain amendments to the ICANN Bylaws as requested by the Generic Names Supporting Organization ("GNSO"). These amendments will result in the number of GNSO Council representatives that each official GNSO Constituency may appoint remain at three (3) appointed by each Constituency following the 2003 Annual Meeting, until the 2004 Annual Meeting. Following the 2004 Annual Meeting, the number of GNSO Council representatives that each GNSO Constituency may appoint shall decrease to two (2).

The following amendments to the Bylaws are proposed, to be considered for adoption at the Board's meeting currently scheduled for 15 January 2004. Deleted text is shown in strikeout type; added text is underlined.

Please forward any comments on the following proposed revisions to <general-counsel@icann.org> 14 January 2004.

Respectfully submitted,
John O. Jeffrey
ICANN General Counsel & Secretary

ARTICLE X: GENERIC NAMES SUPPORTING ORGANIZATION

Section 1. DESCRIPTION

There shall be a policy-development body known as the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), which shall be responsible for developing and recommending to the ICANN Board substantive policies relating to generic top-level domains.

Section 2. ORGANIZATION

The GNSO shall consist of (i) various Constituencies representing particular groups of stakeholders, as described in Section 5 of this Article and (ii) a GNSO Council responsible for managing the policy development process of the GNSO.

Section 3. GNSO COUNCIL

1. Subject to the provisions of the Transition Article of these Bylaws, The GNSO Council shall consist of two three representatives selected by each of the Constituencies described in Section 5 of this Article, and three persons selected by the ICANN Nominating Committee. Following the 2004 Annual Meeting, absent further action by the ICANN Board, the GNSO Council shall consist of two representatives selected by each of the Constituencies. No two representatives selected by a Constituency shall be citizens of the same country or of countries located in the same Geographic Region. There may also be two liaisons to the GNSO Council, one appointed by each of the Governmental Advisory Committee and the At-Large Advisory Committee from time to time, who shall not be members of or entitled to vote on the GNSO Council, but otherwise shall be entitled to participate on equal footing with members of the GNSO Council. The appointing Advisory Committee shall designate its liaison (or revoke or change the designation of its liaison) on the GNSO Council by providing written notice to the Chair of the GNSO Council and to the ICANN Secretary. The GNSO Council may also have observers as described in paragraph 9 of this Section.

2. Subject to the provisions of the Transition Article of these Bylaws, Section 5(8): (a) the regular term of each GNSO Council member shall begin at the conclusion of an ICANN annual meeting and shall end at the conclusion of the second ICANN annual meeting thereafter; (b) the regular term of one representative selected by each Constituency shall begin in an even-numbered year and the regular term of the other representative selected by the Constituency shall begin in an odd-numbered year, provided, however that the regular term of two representatives selcted by the Constituency shall begin following the 2003 Annual Meeting who shall serve until the conclusion of the 2005 Annual Meeting, and the regular term of one representative selected by the Constituency shall begin following the 2003 Annual Meeting and end at the conclusion of the 2004 Annual Meeting; and (c) the regular term of one of the three members selected by the Nominating Committee shall begin in even-numbered years and the regular term of the other two of the three members selected by the Nominating Committee shall begin in odd-numbered years. Each GNSO Council member shall hold office during his or her regular term and until a successor has been selected and qualified or until that member resigns or is removed in accordance with these Bylaws.

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ARTICLE XX: TRANSITION ARTICLE

Section 5. GENERIC NAMES SUPPORTING ORGANIZATION

8. In the absence of further action on the topic by the New Board, each of the GNSO constituencies shall select two representatives to the GNSO Council no later than 1 October 2003As of and following ICANN's 2003 Annual Meeting, each GNSO constituency shall select three (3) representatives to serve on the GNSO Council, and shall provide the ICANN Secretary written notice of its selections. Each constituency shall designate one of those representatives to serve a one-year term, and one to serve a two year-term. Each successor to those representatives shall serve a two-year term. One representative selected by each constituency shall serve for a one-year term, ending as of the end of the 2004 Annual Meeting, and two representatives selected shall serve for a two-year term, ending as of the 2005 Annual Meeting.

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."