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Michelle Bright

Board Content Coordination Director

Biography

Michelle joined ICANN in July 2012 and currently holds the position of Board Content Coordination Director. She is responsible for managing projects and activities for ICANN's 20-person global Board of Directors. A key component of her portfolio consists of directing and driving the complex information flow for the ICANN Board to enable its efficient and effective operation.

Prior to joining ICANN, Michelle served as a Managing Director at Prime Policy Group from 2009-2012 and Vice President at Timmons and Company from 2004-2009, two bipartisan lobbying firms in Washington, D.C. Before that, she served as a legislative assistant to former Congressman Cal Dooley (D-CA) from 1999-2004. In 1998, she assisted in the White House office of Presidential Scheduling and Advance under the Clinton administration.

Michelle has extensive experience in Washington working on a wide range of legislative issues for clients in various sectors.

She graduated cum laude from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, with a degree in Business Administration and Political Science.

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."