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Report on Board Informational Call

  1. Review of timeline for approval of Draft New ICANN Bylaws

    The Board started its call by reviewing its timeline for approval of the Draft New ICANN Bylaws. The timeline is posted at: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/bylaws-coord/2016-May/000327.html.

  2. Update on the outcome of the Bylaws Coordination Group call

    The Bylaws Coordination Group held a call on 26 May at 19:00 UTC (prior to the Board call). During the Bylaws Coordination Group call, five topics were reviewed: grandfathering; gender diversity; GAC changes from NTIA; RySG recommendations; and WHOIS/RDS timing. Two actions were also identified for staff: one was to make a change to the language around the ATRT reviews, and the other to provide a memo that would clarify ICANN's incorporation status per the Articles of Incorporation.

    For reference, the notes and recording of the Bylaws Coordination Group call are available at: https://icann.adobeconnect.com/p1fgfqc8kgw/.

  3. Discussion of any remaining questions

    The Board discussed the timing of the public comment on the Articles of Incorporation and memo requested for clarification of ICANN’s incorporation.

  4. Poll to determine timing of next Board call

    At the end of this call, the Board needed to decide whether to proceed with the Board meeting on 27 May at 13:00 UTC, or to reschedule to the following week. The Board decided not to reschedule. The agenda for the formal Board meeting is available at: https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/agenda-2016-05-27-en.

    No resolutions were considered or approved during the Meeting.

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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."