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Samantha Eisner

Deputy General Counsel

United States of America

Biography

Samantha Eisner is Deputy General Counsel to ICANN, joining the organization in February 2009. Samantha's work at ICANN includes providing legal support to the ICANN organization, community and Board on key initiatives, including the IANA Stewardship Transition, the Cross Community Working Group on Auction Proceeds, and other long-term projects. Samantha also serves as the corporate Secretary to ICANN's affiliate PTI. Samantha works alongside ICANN's General Counsel and Secretary John Jeffrey and the other members of the legal team on all ICANN-related legal matters.

Prior to joining ICANN, Samantha practiced law in the Antitrust and Competition Group at the international law firm Jones Day, advising clients on all aspects of antitrust law, and representing clients in both state and federal courts on antitrust matters and in other related complex corporate litigation suits. While at Jones Day, Samantha served as outside counsel to ICANN since 2005.

Samantha is graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and received her B.A. from Cleveland State University.

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."