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Amy Stathos

Deputy General Counsel

United States of America

Biography

Amy A. Stathos is Deputy General Counsel for ICANN. She joined ICANN in May 2006. Amy is responsible for all ICANN-related litigation, accountability mechanisms and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. Amy also spends a significant portion of her time supporting the ICANN Board of Directors and, in particular, the Board Committees, both as a lead support for some committees and legal support for others. Amy also provides advice to many of the ICANN internal functions and the Executive Committee.

Prior to joining ICANN, Amy practiced for many years at Jones Day where she handled complex business and class action litigation with a strong emphasis on antitrust and unfair competition matters.

Amy holds a B.A. in Communications Studies from UCLA, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Southwestern University School of Law and her California Bar membership in 1993. She is admitted to practice law in the State of California, all four Federal District Courts in California, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court.

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."