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Samiran Gupta

Staff

VP, Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director - APAC

India

Biography

Samiran is Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director, Asia Pacific for ICANN.

Before rejoining ICANN in October 2023, Samiran was Senior Director of Global Government Affairs for India and South Asia with Twitter/X Corp. He previously served as ICANN’s Head of India, and Head of Stakeholder Engagement, South Asia from September 2014 until February 2022. Samiran rejoined ICANN to be the Vice President, Government and Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) Engagement for the APAC region, and Stakeholder Engagement for South Asia.

He has extensive experience in business strategy and public policy consulting in sectors including telecom, entertainment, fintech, e-commerce, social media, and energy and renewables. Before joining ICANN, Samiran served as Senior Director with APCO Worldwide where he was responsible for counseling clients in business and public affairs strategy.

Samiran holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Calcutta.

He is based in New Delhi.

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."