Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Nominating Committee | Committee's Charge

The Nominating Committee (NomCom) is an independent committee tasked with selecting eight members of the Board of Directors and other key positions within ICANN's structure as are set forth in the Bylaws. (See Bylaws Article 8, Section 1.)

ICANN is a not-for-profit, public benefit corporation dedicated to: preserving the operational security and stability of the Internet; promoting competition; achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and supporting the development of policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

The NomCom is charged with populating a portion of the ICANN Board as noted above, as well as the ALAC, the ccNSO Council and the GNSO Council. The NomCom compliments the other means for filling a portion of key ICANN leadership positions achieved within the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees.

The Bylaws also state that the NomCom shall adopt such operating procedures as it deems necessary, which shall be published on the ICANN website.

The NomCom is designed to function independently from the Board, the Supporting Organizations, and Advisory Committees. NomCom members act only on behalf of the interests of the global Internet community and within the scope of the ICANN mission and responsibilities assigned to it by the ICANN Bylaws.

Members contribute to the NomCom both their understanding of the broad interests of the Internet as a whole and their knowledge and experience of the concerns and interests of the Internet stakeholders that have appointed them. The challenge for the NomCom is to integrate these perspectives and derive consensus in its selections. Although appointed by Supporting Organizations and other ICANN bodies, individual NomCom members are not accountable to their appointing constituencies. Members are, of course, accountable for adherence to the Bylaws and for compliance with the rules and procedures established by the NomCom.

The Nominating Committee Structure
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."