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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 23 February 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, 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, Megan Bishop, Samantha Eisner, David Conrad, Melissa King, Vinciane Koenigsfeld, Theresa Swinehart.

  1. Discussion around process for final CCWG-Accountability proposal

    The purpose of this call is to review the final recommendations as submitted to the SOs and ACs by 18 February, including changes included to reflect the Board's input both from the December Board public comments, and subsequent input. The CCWG-Accountability proposal is expected to be provided to the Board on or about 8 March, in time for consideration at the Board's 10 March 2016 meeting at ICANN55.

  2. Overview of Bylaw drafting and next steps

    As part of the overall transition timeline, the Bylaws changes necessary to implement the proposals need to be drafted and adopted before the conclusion of NTIA's review of the IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal and the CCWG-Accountability's proposal. The Board discussed how it could be engaged on this issue to help facilitate the drafting, comment and adoption process occurring in a timely fashion.

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."