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M. Stuart Lynn

Stuart Lynn was President and CEO of ICANN, and an ex officio member of ICANN's Board of Directors, from March 2001 to March 2003.

Prior to joining ICANN he had retired from the position of Associate Vice President for Information Resources and Communications at the University of California Office of the President. In this position he served as CIO of the University of California System responsible for IT policy, planning and coordination across the University. He was also the first President and Chair of the Board of CENIC, the consortium of California universities responsible for advanced services networking in support of the national Internet2 effort. He was part of the founding Internet2 consortium and served as an initial director.

Earlier Lynn's career spanned both the academic and private sector, mostly in the USA. He was Vice President for Information Technologies at Cornell University, following academic and administrative positions at Rice University and the University of California at Berkeley. Earlier in his career he was Director of IBM's then Houston Scientific Center.

He has served on numerous boards of directors, councils, and committees of professional societies and other not-for-profit organizations, and on advisory councils to the private sector.

Lynn's undergraduate work was at Oxford University, England; he subsequently obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics at UCLA, USA. He is a Fellow of the ACM.

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."