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Gisella Gruber

Manager, Policy Development & Operations Support (At-Large)

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Biography

Gisella Gruber joined ICANN in January 2009 as part of the Policy Team Secretariat to support the GNSO and At-Large community. Her role has expanded significantly with the growth of the At-Large community and the Policy Department. Gisella is responsible for management support to the At-Large community and At-Large staff related to meeting management and ICANN Public Meeting scheduling for At-Large. She manages the day to day activities of both the European At-Large Organisation (EURALO) and the Asia Pacific At-Large Organisation (APRALO). She has an extensive background in providing specialized global Customer Service, including 10 years in the field of Corporate Aviation, International Relations and sales. Gisella speaks several European languages, including: Afrikaans, Dutch, English French, German, Italian and some Spanish. She is based in Bath, UK.

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."