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Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson, former Chairman of the ICANN Board, is currently chairman of EDventure Holdings, a small but diversified company focused on emerging information technology worldwide. She is a member of the President's Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption and sits on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Scala Business Solutions, Poland Online, Cygnus Solution, E-Pub Services, Trustworks (Amsterdam), IBS (Moscow), iCat, New World Publishing and the Global Business Network. She is on the advisory boards of Perot Systems and the Internet Capital Group, and a limited partner of the Mayfield Software Fund.

Ms. Dyson is also on the boards and executive committees of the Santa Fe Institute and the Institute for East-West Studies, and on the board of the Eurasia Foundation. She is a founding member of the Russian Software Market Association and a member of the (US) Software Publishers Association. She serves on the advisory boards of The Software Entrepreneurs Forum (Silicon Valley), the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the Russian Internet Technology Center, and the Soros Medical Internet Project.

Previously, she was a securities analyst (New Court Securities, 1977-80; Oppenheimer & Co., 1980-82), and a reporter for Forbes magazine (1974-77).

Ms. Dyson holds a Bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University (1972).

She was appointed as one of ICANN's nine initial directors in October 1998. She served as an ICANN director until 16 November 2000.

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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."