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Report on Board Informational Call on IANA Stewardship Transition

The Board held an Informational Call on the IANA Stewardship Transition telephonically on 18 November 2015 at 2100 UTC.

Board Directors present for all or part of the meeting:
Rinalia Abdul Rahim, Cherine Chalaby (Vice Chair), Fadi Chehadé (President and CEO), Steve Crocker (Chair), Chris Disspain, Asha Hemrajani, Lito Ibarra, Markus Kummer, Lousewies van der Laan, Erika Mann, George Sadowsky, Ron da Silva, Bruce Tonkin and Kuo-Wei Wu.

Board Liaisons present for all or part of the meeting:
Ram Mohan (SSAC Liaison), Thomas Schneider (GAC Liaison), Jonne Soininen (IETF Liaison), and Suzanne Woolf (RSSAC Liaison)

Secretary: John Jeffrey (General Counsel and Secretary)
ICANN Staff present for all or part of the meeting:
Grace Abuhamad, Akram Atallah, Megan Bishop, Michelle Bright, David Conrad, Samantha Eisner, Tarek Kamel, Melissa King, Vinciane Koenigsfeld, Wendy Profit, Theresa Swinehart,  

  1. Mission Statement

    The Board continued its discussion on the proposed revisions to ICANN's mission statement, including its support for modifying the mission statement to make sure that it is factually accurate. The Board discussed concerns with the language currently under consideration within the CCWG-Accountability, and how to balance the issue of keeping a concise mission statement while also addressing the CCWG-Accountability's concerns in identifying the scope of that mission. The Board agreed that its concerns would be reflected in a document for submission to the CCWG-Accountability as soon as possible, and that the liaison to the CCWG-Accountability should submit that document within 24 hours of the Board call.

  2. Review of Timeline and Milestones

    The Board received an update on the current status of the CCWG-Accountability's timeline for publication of its report for public comment. The Board agreed that it would work to have full comments submitted well before the close of comments. The Board also agreed that if it has additional concerns or items for clarification that it believes are important to raise, it would flag those for the CCWG-Accountability prior to 30 November.

No resolutions were considered or approved during the Informational Call.

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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."