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Reconsideration and Independent Review | *ICANN Bylaws Article IV Accountability and Review*

The "Transparency & Accountability" webpage contains an overview of ICANN's accountability and transparency frameworks and mechanisms, as well as status reports on recent accountability and transparency efforts. ICANN's commitment to transparency and accountability is emphasized in its foundational documents, such as its Bylaws, and delineated in the "Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles" adopted by ICANN's Board in 2008. Our commitment also is regularly reinforced in ICANN's strategic and operational plans and in targeted efforts to periodically review and improve ICANN's structures and processes.

In order to reinforce its transparency and accountability mechanisms, ICANN has established processes for reconsideration and independent review of ICANN actions. ICANN has also established the Office of the Ombudsman to evaluate and where possible resolve complaints about unfair or inappropriate treatment by ICANN.

Ombudsman

For more information about ICANN's Ombudsman, please visit http://www.icann.org/ombudsman/.

If you have a dispute you want the Ombudsman to investigate, or to contact the Ombudsman, please visit http://www.icann.org/ombudsman/contact.htm.

Reconsideration

A suggested Reconsideration Request form, an explanatory timeline for the Reconsideration Process and Reconsideration Request documents are available here.

ICANN's Board Governance Committee is responsible to receiving requests from any person or entity that has been materially affected by any ICANN staff action or inaction if such affected person or entity believes the action contradicts established ICANN policies, or by actions or inactions of the Board that such affected person or entity believes has been taken without consideration of material information. Note: this is a brief summary of the relevant Bylaws provisions. For more information about ICANN's reconsideration process, please visit http://www.icann.org/en/about/governance/bylaws#IV and http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/governance.

Independent Review

In addition to the Office of the Ombudsman and its reconsideration process, ICANN has also established a separate process for independent third-party review of Board actions alleged by an affected party to be inconsistent with ICANN's Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws. For additional information about the independent review process, please refer to ICANN Bylaws Article IV, Section 3. The Bylaws provide that requests for independent review will be referred to an Independent Review Panel ("IRP"). ICANN has designated the International Centre for Dispute Resolution to operate the independent review process. To initiate a request for Independent Review, please complete the ICDR form which can be found here [PDF, 146 KB]. ICDR will then contact you to discuss the process in more detail. For more information on the ICDR's International Arbitration rules and procedures, click here. Details of the supplemental rules for the ICANN process can be found here [DOCX, 30 KB]. IRP documents can be found here.

The Cooperative Engagement Process for requests for independent review is available here [PDF, 49 KB].

Answers to recurring questions regarding the IRP are located here.

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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."