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IANA Stewardship Transition and Enhancing ICANN Accountability Engagement and Participation Statistics

In its March 2014 announcement, NTIA asked ICANN to convene an inclusive, global discussion that involved the full range of stakeholders to collectively develop a proposal for the transition. Immediately following, ICANN convened stakeholders most directly served by the IANA functions, as well as governments, the private sector and civil society, to determine the process for transitioning stewardship of the IANA functions. At each step, stakeholders have – and continue to be given – ample opportunity to comment and provide feedback, and the entire Internet community is highly encouraged to participate.

Global Participation

Transition events tracked from March 2014 through March 2016

  • More than 1,100 total events (590+ webinars)
    • 96 North America
    • 61 Latin America/Caribbean
    • 56 Africa
    • 120 Europe
    • 183 Asia/Asia Pacific

For more information on these events, interested stakeholders can view the event calendars of the technical organizations listed below:

AfriNIC: http://www.afrinic.net/en/community/afrinic-events/events-calendar
APNIC: http://www.apnic.net/events/calendar
ARIN: https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/index.html
ICANN: https://features.icann.org/events-near-you
IETF: http://www.ietf.org/meeting/upcoming.html
ISOC: http://www.internetsociety.org/events/event-calendar
LACNIC: http://www.lacnic.net/web/eventos/inicio
RIPE-NCC: https://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/calendar/
W3C: http://www.w3.org/participate/eventscal

Diversity and Engagement in Working Groups1

Listed below are the engagement and participation statistics for the working groups associated with the IANA Stewardship Transition and Enhancing ICANN Accountability processes:

IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG)

The ICG is made up of 30 individuals representing 13 communities of both direct and indirect stakeholders of the IANA functions.

Diversity:

  • Africa: 13%
  • Asia/Asia Pacific: 17%
  • Europe: 30%
  • Latin America/Caribbean: 10%
  • North America: 30%

Engagement (through March 2016):

  • Total Calls/Meetings: 39
  • Total Meeting Hours: 130
  • Total Mailing List Exchanges: 5,540

In addition to the ICG, there has been notable and diverse engagement within the working groups of the operational communities of IANA. Information on these groups are below:

Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability)

The CCWG-Accountability is made up of 28 members representing the 6 organizations who chartered the group, and 203 participants who engage in day-to-day discussions and proposal development.

Diversity:

  • Africa: 7%
  • Asia/Asia Pacific: 26%
  • Europe: 28%
  • Latin America/Caribbean: 8%
  • North America: 31%

Engagement (through March 2016):

  • Total Calls/Meetings: 209
  • Total Meeting Hours: 404
  • Total Mailing List Exchanges: 12,430

1 In addition to this remarkable community involvement in the processes, it is important to note that engagement in the transition has proven to be much broader than just the ICANN community. Whether exhibited by submitting public comments, attending webinars, or asking for and receiving updates, it is apparent that there is no shortage of effort dedicated to these processes.

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."