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John Jeffrey

Staff

General Counsel and Secretary

United States of America

Biography

John Jeffrey has been the General Counsel and Secretary at ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for the past 21 years. John also has served as Co-Deputy to the CEO since 2018.

John has managed ICANN’s Governance function and served as its head lawyer and secretary to the Board of Directors for more than two decades. He oversees ICANN’s Legal department, crisis management teams, Board support, Nominating Committee support and the Complaints Office.

John joined ICANN in 2003 with broad legal and business experience in the technology and entertainment industries, and had provided services to individuals, non-profits/trusts, and companies (from startups to Fortune 500 companies) as a deal-maker, litigator, corporate and intellectual property lawyer, and business executive. John has managed business functions relating to legal, strategic, corporate and business development, corporate governance, advertising, marketing, operations, and public relations in various companies.

Before joining ICANN, John spent four years at the Silicon Valley streaming media/Internet radio company Live365, where he was the Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy and General Counsel. He was actively involved in helping to frame the issues and public discussion surrounding the US Copyright Offices' Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) relating to Digital Sound Recording Performance Royalties for Webcasting and helped lead a grassroots effort that resulted in the passing of copyright legislation relating to webcasting royalties for small webcasters/Internet radio. John also previously served as Director of Business and Legal Affairs and Senior Counsel of Legal Affairs at global entertainment company, Discovery Communications, Inc. (noted for the Discovery Channel, TLC, Travel Channel, and others) where he negotiated television and technology deals for Discovery's content and distribution channels around the world.

John began his in-house experience at News Corporation, working on the business affairs and legal teams at Fox Television during the launch of its cable television division and first websites. He also was a member of the launch team for the FX and FXM: Movies from Fox cable channels.

John started his legal career as a litigation attorney in Los Angeles, defending businesses and professionals in United States' Federal Courts and California State Courts. He also managed his own media consulting business, Point Break Media.

John holds a political science degree from the University of Dayton, and a law degree from Southwestern University School of Law. John has been a lawyer and member of the California, US Federal District Court (CD, CA), and US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals legal bar associations for over three decades.

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."