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About The Ombuds Office

The ICANN Ombuds

Elizabeth Field has served as ICANN Ombuds since October 2024. She is a member of the International Ombuds Association, and has two decades of international experience as a mediator, facilitator, conflict coach, restorative practitioner, and organizational development advisor.

Elizabeth is based in Geneva and speaks English, French, and Spanish.

You can read Elizabeth's blogs as ICANN Ombuds.

Contact the Elizabeth at [email protected]

The ICANN Ombuds Office

The Ombuds Office is a confidential, impartial and independent community-developed mechanism that supports ICANN's community and promotes fair, respectful and dignified treatment of all community members.

The Ombuds Office uses collaborative methods to help community members resolve conflict and evaluates or investigates community member complaints of unfair or inappropriate treatment by ICANN staff, Board, or constituent groups within ICANN.

The Ombuds Office operates independently from other parts of ICANN. The Ombuds reports to the ICANN Board on the Office's activities. The Ombuds Office does not report to the Board on individual cases, unless required by policy or law.

The scope of the Ombuds Office is set out in Article 5 of the ICANN Bylaws.

The Ombuds Office Framework and Process

The Ombuds Framework explains what community members can expect from the Office.

The Ombuds Framework and Process is being revised following Public Comment.

Ombuds Office Mission

The Ombuds Office contributes to a resilient ICANN multistakeholder model by providing a trusted and accessible Ombuds service to the ICANN community to promote fair treatment, respectful dialogue and constructive problem-solving.

Strategy 2025-2030

The Ombuds Office will focus on providing high quality services and using community feedback to keep improving. The Ombuds Office will also support ICANN to learn from conflict and complaints so that ICANN is better for everyone. The goal is for the Ombuds Office to be trusted by, and accessible to, all ICANN community members.

The Ombuds Office has three main priorities over the next five years:

  • Excellence: Ensure the highest standards of quality and integrity in Ombuds Office work.
  • Trust: Build trusting relationships with the community so everyone feels confident and comfortable coming to the Ombuds Office for help.
  • Prevention: Encourage positive behavior across ICANN and stop harmful behavior before it starts.
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."