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Christopher Bare

Director, Global Implementation & Operations

United States of America

Biography

Chris Bare is a Director, Global Implementation & Operations (GDD) with over 19 years experience in building and managing complex processes. He joined ICANN in May 2012 as part of the New gTLD Program team. As a Director in the Global Domains Division he oversees day to day operations of the New gTLD Program, including all Application Processing, Contracting, and Transition to Delegation. In his prior roles at ICANN he managed the Customer Service Center and supported several aspects of the New gTLD Program including Community Priority Evaluation (CPE), Auctions, Change Requests, and Continuing Operations Instruments (COI). Prior to ICANN he worked at a Big 4 consulting firm as an IT consultant specializing in IT Security and Governance audits, system implementation and compliance reviews, business process improvement, and business continuity. His clients included dozens of companies from the automotive, healthcare, real estate, and hi-tech industries.

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."