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Message from Marilyn Cade (Commercial and Business Users Constituency) to Vint Cerf

Subject: RE: [council] Re:
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003
From: Cade,Marilyn S
To: Vinton Cerf
CC: Louis Touton, Alejandro Pisanty, Stuart Lynn

Vint, I didn't recall seeing an acknowledgement of the contribution by the Commercial and Business Users Constituency which seems to have started this series of contributions from other constituencies. I hope, however, that you and the board have received it. That is the purpose of this follow up contact. The contribution we made was clear that we have accepted and are working within the weighted voting on policy matters. We are concerned though, that in the matters of electing board members from the SO, that the broadest possible support be ensured.

I saw that one contribution expressed concern that new constituencies would be approved, and the vote unequalized. As we understand it, the equalization of votes between the "providers" – Registrars and Registries – is balanced with the constituencies, with the additional three votes then added in from the Nominating Committee. The Policy process seems to be firmly balanced, with a strong message for the need for collaboration and compromise built in.

As you know, this constituency has a firm commitment to ICANN's success. Of course, we understand that the Board has many factors to weigh. We ask that you include our input in your considerations.

Marilyn Cade

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."