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ICANN's Early Days

ICANN History Project

The second track of the ICANN History Project focuses on the early days of ICANN, charting the evolution of ICANN’s early technical, business, and structural changes. This track examines the pre-ICANN landscape, the steps leading up to ICANN’s establishment, the development of early policy-making bodies at ICANN, and vital contracts and agreements.

Check out the interactive timelineinterviews, and resources to learn more about the early days of ICANN.

Timeline

Interviews

Esther Dyson | Mike Roberts | Current and former Directors of ICANN's Board | Marilyn Cade | John Crain | Chuck Gomes & Elliot Noss | Roberto Gaetano | Ram Mohan | Diane Schroeder | Suzanne Woolf

Esther Dyson on ICANN's early days

Interview with Esther Dyson, ICANN Board Chair (1998-2000)

 

Audio Recording: EN

Mike Roberts on ICANN's early days

Interview with Mike Roberts, ICANN CEO (1998-2001)

 

Audio Recording: EN

Current and former Directors of ICANN's Board meet to discuss ICANN's early days

Current and former Directors of ICANN's Board meet at ICANN59 to discuss ICANN's early days.

Audio Recording: EN

Marilyn Cade on ICANN's early days

Interview with Marilyn Cade, CEO at ICT Strategies, mCADE LLC

 

Audio Recording: EN

John Crain on ICANN's early days

Interview with John Crain, Chief SSR Officer at ICANN

 

Audio Recording: EN

Chuck Gomes and Elliot Noss discuss ICANN’s early days

Chuck Gomes, VP of Policy and Compliance at Verisign, and Elliot Noss, President & CEO at Tucows, meet to discuss ICANN’s early days.

 

Audio Recording: EN

Roberto Gaetano on ICANN's early days

Interview with Roberto Gaetano, ICANN Board (2003-2009)

 

TranscriptsEN | AR | ES | FR | RU | ZH

Ram Mohan on ICANN's early days

Interview with Ram Mohan, SSAC Liaison to ICANN Board since 2008

 

TranscriptsEN | AR | ES | FR | RU | ZH

Diane Schroeder on ICANN's early days

Interview with Diane Schroeder, SVP, Global Human Resources at ICANN

 

Audio Recording: EN

Suzanne Woolf on ICANN's early days

Interview with Suzanne Woolf, RSSAC Liaison to the ICANN Board (2004-2016)

 

Audio Recording: EN

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."