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Sally Costerton

Staff

Sr. Advisor to President & SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement and Interim President & CEO

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Biography

Sally is an experienced global leader. She has served as Senior Advisor to the President and Senior Vice President, Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) since 2012, and is also currently serving as ICANN’s Interim President and Chief Executive Officer. In her role, she is responsible for ICANN’s international offices and internationalization strategy. Her direct reports include the regional office managing directors and regional vice presidents, as well as the vice presidents of Meetings and Public Responsibility Support (PRS). Most recently, Sally led the development phase of the ICANN Grant Program, the Emergency Support Infrastructure Project and ICANN organization’s contributions to the Anti-Harassment Board Working Group. Under the GSE function, she leads the GSE, Meetings, and Public Responsibility Support teams.

Prior to joining ICANN, Sally led one of Europe’s largest public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton, as EMEA CEO. In this role, she was responsible for more than 1,000 staff members in 33 offices. Throughout her career, Sally has worked with diverse international companies and senior leaders to maximize their resources and build strong relationships with their stakeholders. She is an experienced Board Director, including roles as Board Chair.

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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."