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PTI Expected Standards of Behavior

Adopted 28 September 2016

Those who take part in Public Technical Identifiers’ (“PTI”) processes and activities, including Board, staff, customers and all others who interact with PTI, undertake to:

Act in accordance with PTI’s Bylaws. In particular, participants undertake to act within the purpose of PTI as articulated in PTI’s Bylaws.

Adhere to PTI’s conflict of interest policy.

Treat all participants in PTI processes and activities equally, irrespective of nationality, gender, racial or ethnic origin, religion or beliefs, disability, age, or sexual orientation; participants in PTI processes and activities should treat each other with civility both face-to-face and online.

Respect all participants in PTI processes and activities equally, behave in a professional manner and demonstrate appropriate behavior. PTI strives to create and maintain an environment in which people of many different backgrounds and cultures are treated with dignity, decency, and respect. Specifically, participants in PTI’s processes and activities must not engage in any type of harassment. Generally, harassment is considered unwelcome hostile or intimidating behavior — in particular, speech or behavior that is sexually aggressive or that intimidates based on attributes such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, color, national origin, ancestry, disability or medical condition, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Act in a reasonable, objective and informed manner when participating in PTI processes and activities. This includes attending scheduled meetings and exercising independent judgment based solely on what is in the overall best interest of PTI or PTI’s ability to carry out the purposes of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) by performing the IANA functions on behalf of ICANN, irrespective of personal interests and the interests of the entity to which an individual might owe their appointment.

Listen to the views of all stakeholders when considering recommendations that will impact PTI. PTI’s processes and activities take place in a unique multi-stakeholder environment. Those who take part in PTI processes and activities must acknowledge the importance of all stakeholders and seek to understand their points of view.

Work to build consensus with other stakeholders in order to find solutions applicable to the work and operation of PTI. Those who take part in the PTI processes and activities must take responsibility for ensuring the success of the multi-stakeholder model by trying to build consensus with other participants.

Facilitate transparency and openness when participating in decision-making processes.

Support the maintenance of robust mechanisms for public input, accountability, and transparency so as to ensure that decision-making processes will reflect the public interest and be accountable to all stakeholders.

Conduct themselves in accordance with PTI policies.

Protect the organization’s assets and ensure their efficient and effective use.

Act fairly and in good faith with other participants in the PTI processes and activities.

Promote ethical and responsible behavior. Ethics and integrity are essential, and PTI expects all stakeholders to behave in a responsible and principled way.

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."