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Report on Board Informational Call on IANA Stewardship Transition

The Board held an Informational Call on the IANA Stewardship Transition in Hong Kong on 10 December 2015 at 0100 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, Bruno Lanvin, 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, Xavier Calvez, David Conrad, Teresa Elias, Samantha Eisner, Tarek Kamel, Melissa King, Vinciane Koenigsfeld, Allen Grogan, Theresa Swinehart,

  1. Determine Position on the CCWG-Accountability Recommendations  
  2. The main objective for this call was to review each of the CCWG-Accountability recommendations, discuss Board member concerns (if any), and determine a Board position on which to draft comments for each of the twelve recommendations. In determining its position, the Board focused on providing a rationale based on the 16 October 2014 resolution, and including a proposal for a solution to areas of concern. The Board acknowledged that other solutions were possible, but wanted to provide the CCWG-Accountability with a starting point.

  3. Discuss procedure for areas of disagreement on Final Proposal
  4. The Board considered the timeline, with planned delivery of the CCWG-Accountability Final Proposal by mid-January. The Board also reviewed the CCWG-Accountability Charter, which gives the CCWG-Accountability discretion in deciding whether or not to submit the proposal without full Chartering Organization support. The Board agreed that should there be concerns with the Final Report, the Board could enter intro discussion with the CCWG-Accountability, per the 16 October 2014 resolution.

  5. Establish a Communication Plan
  6. The Board agreed to reach out to the CCWG-Accountability Co-Chairs with an update on the Board’s comments, in advance of their joint call on 13 December. The Board also agreed to reach out to SO/AC leads and representative communities following the release of the Board’s comments.

No resolutions were considered or approved during the Informational Call.

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."