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Press Release: ICANN Board Elects New Leadership

Los Angeles – 5 October 2022 – During the ICANN75 Annual General Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced a new leadership team to head the ICANN Board of Directors. Tripti Sinha and Danko Jevtović were elected Board Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. Additionally, four new Board members took their seats.

The new ICANN Board Chair Tripti Sinha brings more than three decades of experience in Internet and Internet infrastructure technologies. She was selected to serve as Chair by her fellow Board members and previously served as ICANN's Board Governance Committee Chair. The Board Governance Committee will now be led by fellow Board member Sarah Deutsch.

Selected for the Board by ICANN's 2018 Nominating Committee, Sinha previously held leadership roles in ICANN working with the root server community. She currently serves as Assistant Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in the Division of Information Technology and the Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads at the University of Maryland.

"It is an honor to be selected chair of the ICANN Board of Directors," said Sinha. "The Internet is used by more than five billion people today, with more coming online every day. ICANN plays a critical role in the technical governance of the Internet, and it is our responsibility to ensure that it remains stable, secure, and resilient for those users. I look forward to working with the Board, the organization, and the ICANN community to serve ICANN's mission and protect this global resource."

The new ICANN Board Vice-Chair Danko Jevtović also brings much experience to his role, including governance. He most recently served as ICANN Board's Finance Committee Chair and will continue to serve in that role as well. Jevtović previously was a founding partner of one of the first Internet service providers in Serbia, SezamPro, and is currently a partner at Jugodata Ltd. He also was also selected for the Board by ICANN's 2018 Nominating Committee.

The ICANN Board also welcomed the following new members: Chris Chapman and Sajid Rahman, selected by the ICANN Nominating Committee; Christian Kaufmann, selected by the Address Supporting Organization; and Wes Hardaker, selected as the Root Server System Advisory Committee's non-voting liaison to the Board.

Outgoing Chair Maarten Botterman and Vice-Chair León Sánchez remain on the Board of Directors and will work to support the new leadership.

The ICANN Board, composed of 20 members from five geographic world regions, is the oversight body of ICANN. 

The new Board leaders were elected during ICANN's Annual General Meeting, held from 17 to 22 September 2022 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. More than 1,200 attendees participated in person, and more than 800 attended remotely. They took part in more than 200 working and training sessions and discussed issues crucial to a secure, stable, interoperable Internet, including Domain Name System security threats, Universal Acceptance of domain names, and geopolitical, legislative, and regulatory developments that affect the functioning of the Internet.

For more information about ICANN's Board of Directors, please visit here.

For a high-resolution image of Tripti Sinha, please visit here.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.

 

Media Contacts

Liana Teo
Head of Communications, APAC
Singapore
Tel. +65 9113 2001
liana.teo@icann.org
or press@icann.org

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."