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Sally Newell Cohen

SVP, Global Communications

United States of America

Biography

Sally Newell Cohen is the Senior Vice President of Global Communications and Language Services at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In addition to leading a global communications team, she is the principal communications strategist and advisor to the CEO, Executive Team, and Board of Directors.

A proven leader in marketing and communications, Sally is known for building strong teams and executing strategies that elevate competitive advantage, promote growth, and enhance brand awareness. She leads the strategic communications effort to build greater awareness of ICANN’s global mission.

Most recently, Sally was the Chief Operations Officer at Toastmasters International, where she partnered with the Board of Directors and CEO to design a comprehensive strategic plan. Under her leadership, her team accomplished a global rebranding effort that revitalized the company’s image and increased membership. Prior to this, Sally was Senior Vice President at WunderMarx/PR and held several leadership positions at Ingram Micro.

Sally has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Keene State College and has completed executive education programs at Harvard University and Stanford University. She began her career as a journalist, where her natural curiosity was put to use as a reporter and editor.

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."