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Sally Costerton

Staff

Sr Advisor to President & SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement

    Biography

    Sally spearheads ICANN’s strategic global engagement, which is critical to ICANN’s mission to preserving a Multistakeholder model for an open, singular and secure Internet. With a wealth of experience in complex international Multistakeholder environments, Sally and her team cover the globe to engage all stakeholders in the internet ecosystem. Before joining ICANN, she led one of Europe’s largest public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton, for over six year as EMEA CEO. In her career, Sally has worked with diverse international companies and Senior Leaders for the past twenty years to maximize their resources and build strong relationships with their stakeholders. As one of Europe’s leading communications experts she has been the Chairman and Board member of the PRCA (Public Relations Consultants Association) since 2006.

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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."