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Background on GNSO Improvements

The GNSO Improvements implementation effort is now being coordinated and managed by the two steering committees: the Operating Steering Committee (OSC) and the Policy Process Steering Committee (PPSC).

The PPSC, slated to meet on a bi-weekly basis, oversees the work of two work teams:  one focused on developing a new and improved Policy Development Process (PDP) and a second on a standardized working group model. The OSC initially plans to meet on a weekly basis and will oversee work team efforts to implement Board directives regarding:

  • GNSO Council operations;
  • Stakeholder group and constituency processes and operations; and
  • Efforts to improve substantially the various communications functions in the GNSO community that will lead to broader and more effective community participation in all policy development activities.

GNSO Council Restructuring Schedule

  • As directed by the ICANN Board, implementation of and the transition to a newly structured GNSO Council will follow its own specific timetable. The Board expects a new council to be seated at the June 2009 ICANN Asia Meeting in Sydney, Australia. The current GNSO Council began discussing specific implementation planning for the transition during the Cairo meetings. The Council prepared a report outlining the issues, timetables and possible approaches to an efficient transition to the newly structured GNSO Council, and it shared the latest version of that document with ICANN Board members prior to their 11 December 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."