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ATRT Recommendation 20 – Decisional Input Checklist

In fulfillment of ATRT Recommendation 20, which states:

The Board should ensure that all necessary inputs that have been received in policy making processes are accounted for and included for consideration by the Board. To assist in this, the Board should as soon as possible adopt and make available to the community a mechanism such as a checklist or template to accompany documentation for Board decisions that certifies what inputs have been received and are included for consideration by the Board.

ICANN is posting an Input Tracking Checklist [DOC, 48 KB] that is to accompany all policy recommendations that come to the Board for decision. The checklist requires identification of key inputs and a summary of how those key inputs were considered.

The Input Tracking Checklist will change as needed to best reflect the status of inputs within ICANN. The first version of the decisional checklist was provided to the GNSO Council for review and consideration in August 2012, and Version 2 reflects improvements as suggested by members of the GNSO. If you have ideas for improvement to the Input Checklist, please submit to rec-20-checklist@icann.org. Revised checklists will be posted as available.

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."