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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 January 2016 at 2200 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, Michelle Bright, Samantha Eisner, Melissa King, Vinciane Koenigsfeld, Theresa Swinehart,

Update on CCWG-Accountability Recommendations

The main objective for this call was to review and update the Board position for each of ten of the twelve CCWG-Accountability recommendations, upon review of the revised drafts of recommendations. The Board considered the status of each of the recommendations, with a particular focus on the issues that the Board flagged in its comments on the Third Draft Proposal as matters of high concern. Where concerns remained about the proposals, the Board agreed that it was important to communicate these concerns to the CCWG as quickly as possible to minimize workflow delays as the CCWG-Accountability finalizes its work.

The Board identified the following areas that it would provide further input to the CCWG, including:

Inspection rights; IANA budget issues; WS2; escalation timeframes; and individual Board removal and waiver.

The Board agreed that further conversation was needed on Mission Statement and inclusion of Human Rights in the Bylaws.

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."