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Board Governance Committee ALAC Review Working Group | Communique for 23 April 2008 Meeting

The BGC At Large Advisory Committee Working Group (WG) held its first meeting on 23 April 2008 to discuss how the WG will work and the independent reviewer’s progress to date.

  • WG members introduced themselves: Harald Alvestrand, Karl Auerbach, Vittorio Bertola, Tricia Drakes (Chair), Thomas Narten, and Jean‐Jacques Subrenat (Nii Quaynor absent).
  • The WG Chair advised that the Board Governance Committee (BGC) had written and approved the At-Large Review Working Group Charter and Board agreement was imminent.
  • WG members discussed procedures and processes for conducting their work and agreed to period public communiqués to keep the public apprised of their activities. The Chair indicated that she would like to appoint a Vice Chair and is determining the process for this.
  • The WG received a status report on the independent evaluator’s efforts. Westlake is currently interviewing and soliciting comments from the community and the WG encourages the community to provide input to the review. Westlake provides the WG with monthly status reports.
  • WG members discussed future meetings. They will have additional (conference call) meetings prior to the ICANN Paris meeting to track the evaluator’s progress, as well as public workshops in Paris to discuss the independent review.
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."