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Michael Karakash

Staff

Sr. Policy Research Manager

United States of America

Biography

Michael holds the position of Policy Research and Implementation Manager where he is responsible for supporting the Policy Research and Stakeholder Programs team within ICANN’s Global Domains and Strategy department. His areas of focus include activities related to the launch of the Next Round of New gTLDs as well as assisting in drafting policy and conducting research to support wide-ranging projects, review teams, and initiatives.

He received his Master of Arts in Public Diplomacy from the University of Southern California, and his Bachelor of Arts in Literary Journalism from the University of California, Irvine, where he also minored in African American Studies. Michael also studied International Relations and Photojournalism at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and he speaks fluent English, Armenian, Spanish, and Turkish.

When he's not navigating the complexities of global domains, you might find Michael exploring the intersections of technology and society, capturing the essence of cultures through his lens, or engaging in thought-provoking discussions on the future of the internet.

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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."