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David McGill

Staff

Legal Counsel

United States of America

    Biography

    David joined ICANN staff in April 2016. David is involved in the drafting and negotiation of technology and procurement contracts, provides general transactional legal advice, and develops strategic processes for a wide range of transactions for ICANN. David brings over five years of legal experience in contracts, litigation, and intellectual property law. Following a judicial clerkship with the Rhode Island Supreme Court, David worked for the legal department of a "Big Six" publisher in New York, where he drafted and negotiated digital agreements for trade imprints and led trainings on intellectual property rights and contract interpretation issues for all trade editorial units. David obtained his BA in Political Science from Furman University and his JD cum laude from the University of Richmond T.C. Williams School of Law. During the pursuit of his law degree, he studied nonprofit and intellectual property law at Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy.

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    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."