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Message from Louis Touton to GNSO Council Regarding Challenge to NCUC Selection of Its Council Representatives

Subject: [council] General Counsel's Analysis Regarding Challenge to Non-Commercial Users Constituency Election of GNSO Council Representatives
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003
From: Louis Touton
To: GNSO Council
CC: DannyYounger, Harold Feld, Marc Schneiders, Michael Palage, Alejandro Pisanty, Philip Sheppard, Barbara Simons

To the GNSO Council:

As you will recall, on 12 March 2003 I received from Danny Younger a challenge to the Non-Commercial Users Constituency's selection in early March of its three representatives to the GNSO Council. This challenge has prompted the GNSO Council to delay ratification of its vote concerning selection of an ICANN Director for Seat 14 on the New Board.

As General Counsel, I undertook to investigate the challenge. I requested and received various materials and comments from the Non-Commerical Users Constituency and Mr. Younger, which were helpful in illuminating the issues.

The investigation has now been completed and I have posted the General Counsel's Analysis Regarding Challenge to Non-Commercial Users Constituency Election of GNSO Council Representatives at <http://www.icann.org/legal/analysis-ncuc-challenge-08apr03.htm>. That analysis concludes that it would not be appropriate, based on Mr. Younger's challenge, to set aside the written designation of the NCUC's GNSO Council representatives.

Like all other constituencies, the Non-Commercial Users Constituency is obligated to submit a new charter and statement of operating procedures by 15 July 2003. The General Counsel's Analysis observes that, although setting aside the selection process is not warranted, the circumstances do warrrant a fundamental assessment in connection with the new charter of how to redesign the constituency to better represent the interests of non-commercial organizations globally that use the Internet.

Best regards,

Louis Touton

cc: Danny Younger
Harold Feld
Marc Schneiders
Michael Palage
Alejandro Pisanty
Philip Sheppard
Barbara Simons

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."