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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 19 February 2016 at 1400 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), Ron da Silva, Chris Disspain, Asha Hemrajani, Lito Ibarra, Markus Kummer, Lousewies van der Laan, Bruno Lanvin, Erika Mann, George Sadowsky, Mike Silber, 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, Sally Costerton, Samantha Eisner, David Conrad, Tarek Kamel, Melissa King, Vinciane Koenigsfeld, Trang Nguyen, Theresa Swinehart, Wendy Profit

  1. Review of the ICG Proposal and Process for Finalization

    The purpose of this call was to prepare for the Board receiving the final ICG proposal combining the three operational community recommendations. Receipt of this set of recommendations may be before ICANN55, or latest at the beginning of ICANN55. The call presented a short summary reminder on the ICG proposal and the process resulting in the ICG proposal, including the Board's input during that process and final comments. The final comments supported the proposal and noted some areas for clarification around implementation: see https://comments.ianacg.org/pdf/submission/submission121.pdf.

  2. Update on CCWG-Accountability Recommendations

    As part of staying informed on the latest developments of the CCWG-Accountability recommendations, the Board shared updates on the work in the CCWG-Accountability. The Board agreed to share inputs with the CCWG on the GAC carve-out issue.

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."