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Board Governance Committee ALAC Review Working Group | Communiqué for 14 August 2008

The BGC At Large Advisory Committee Working Group (WG) held its fifth meeting on 14 August 2008 to discuss the independent reviewer’s Final Report and upcoming WG efforts related to the ALAC Review in preparation of the Cairo meeting.

  • The Chair advised the WG that Westlake Consulting completed their final report as scheduled and it was posted on 28 July 2008 for review and comment. Translated versions of the final report were posted on 13 August 2008.
  • The community is encouraged to review the final report and submit comments on ICANN’s Public Participation site. The public may submit their comments until 12 September 2008 when the comment period on the final report closes.
  • The WG reviewed and discussed the recommendations in the WLC report and plans to consult with others in the community on the final report as they begin preparing the WGs draft paper.
  • The Chair advised that the links and text of the ALAC Review ICANN web pages have been updated.
  • The Chair advised the WG that two workshops have been requested to be added to ICANN’s Cairo meeting agenda. The WG began preliminary discussion of the workshops to be held during the Cairo meeting.
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."