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George Sadowsky

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ICANN Board Member

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Biography

George Sadowsky studied and taught mathematics at Harvard and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale. He worked as a mathematician and programmer, and headed computing centers at the Brookings Institution, Northwestern University and New York University. At the United Nations, he supported technical assistance projects and has worked in more than 50 developing countries. He has been a consultant to inter alia, the U.S. Treasury, UNDP, USAID, W3C, the Swiss Government, and the World Bank. He has served on Boards of AppliedTheory Corporation, educational networks CREN and NYSERNet, and the Internet Society where he directed ISOC's Developing Country Network Training Workshops. More recently he was Executive Director of GI, the Global Internet Policy Initiative. He has written and lectured extensively on ICT and development. He recently completed writing and editing a book for the Web Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, 'Accelerating Development Using the Web: Empowering Poor and Marginalized Populations,' which is available at http://public.webfoundation.org/publications/accelerating-development/.

George was selected for his first 3-year term on the Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee, beginning after ICANN's annual meeting in Seoul on 30 October, 2009, and serving through the annual meeting in Toronto in 2012. He has been selected for a second 3-year term beginning after the annual meeting in Toronto on 19 October, 2012, and serving through the annual meeting in 2015.

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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."