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Amadeu Abril i Abril

Amadeu Abril i Abril teaches European Union Law, Competition Law, and IT Law at ESADE Law School, Ramon Llull University (a private University based in Barcelona). He also is an attorney-at-law specialising in distribution contracts, competition law and IT law. He was admitted to the Barcelona Bar in 1985, where he currently serves as Secretary to its Competition Law & Policy Section. Between 1986 and 1988 he worked at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition Policy.

His private practice has been significantly reduced since 1997, as he has been acting as a consultant on Internet and e-commerce affairs to a number of European companies, most notably as Legal & Policy Advisor to Nominalia Internet SL, a domain-name registrar. He has been and is also involved in a number of pro-bono Net-related initiatives, such as BCNet, a local community network; a pioneering project on electronic democracy (http://bcnet.upc.es/democ.htm); and the domini .ct campaign, a 7000+ adherents strong campaign seeking the recognition of a TLD aimed for the Catalan-speaking cultural community. He has been specially involved in all the DNS reform process that eventually has brought ICANN into existence. He was elected to the gTLD-MoU Policy Oversight Committee. He was a member of the DNSO Names Council representing the Registrars Constituency until his selection for the ICANN Board of Directors, and co-chaired DNSO Working Group A on uniform dispute resolution policy.

Amadeu Abril i Abril obtained his law degree from the University of Barcelona in 1985, and continued his legal education in different post-graduate and research programs at the Centre Européen Universtaire of the University of Nancy II (France), the Institut d’Études Européenes of the Free University Brussels (Belgium) and the European University Institute at Florence (Italy).

Amadeu was selected for the ICANN Board by the Domain Name Supporting Organization to a term starting at the 1999 annual meeting and expiring 26 June 2003.

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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."