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Report on Board Informational Call on IANA Stewardship Transition

The Board held an Informational Call on the IANA Stewardship Transition telephonically on 12 November 2015 at 0030 UTC.

Board Directors present for all or part of the meeting:
Rinalia Abdul Rahim, Cherine Chalaby (Vice Chair), Steve Crocker (Chair), Chris Disspain, Asha Hemrajani, Lito Ibarra, Markus Kummer, Lousewies van der Laan, Erika Mann, George Sadowsky, Ron da Silva, Bruce Tonkin and Kuo-Wei Wu

Board Liaisons present for all or part of the meeting:
Ram Mohan (SSAC Liaison), Thomas Schneider (GAC Liaison), Jonne Soininen (IETF Liaison), and Suzanne Woolf (RSSAC Liaison)

Secretary: John Jeffrey (General Counsel and Secretary)
ICANN Staff present for all or part of the meeting:
David Conrad, Samantha Eisner, Theresa Swinehart, Tarek Kamel, Melissa King,

  1. Review of Timeline & Milestones

    The Board discussed a potential timeline to consider and prepare comments to the CCWG-Accountability documents that are slated for posting, with agreement that any Board comments should be provided as early as possible within the comment period.

  2. Mission Statement

    The Board discussed the status of the active CCWG discussions on the revision of ICANN's mission statement, including changes requested to factually clarify the role of ICANN in relation to protocol parameters while still assuring that the full scope of ICANN's work is reflected. The Board noted a lack of consensus, so far, among the CCWG on language related to ICANN's ability to enforce its contracts, and the significant debate apparent on the list. The Board discussed the need for clear, simple and understandable language for its mission, and its hope that resulting text from the CCWG would be in that spirit.

  3. Update on Key Issues

    The Board received an update on key areas, including:

    • The status of a response to the CCWG regarding WS2, noting that it should be out soon.
    • Overview on the evolving discussions regarding Stress Test 18, noting that the status is quickly changing both on the CCWG list as well as in conversation at the IGF in Brazil. The issue of the 2/3 vote of the Board to take action not consistent with GAC advice has been revived as a topic of discussion on this issue.
    • Inspection rights and the need to develop a Board position on the late addition to the WS1 effort, as well the need to identify ways to enhance transparency around this area in response to the community requests.
    • Full Board recall: the Board discussed the evolution of the community thresholds required to enact this power, in light of the clear indication that some ACs will not be participating in the community consensus process, and the need to track the emerging consensus thresholds for Board consideration.

No resolutions were considered or approved during the Informational Call.

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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."