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Adam Peake

Staff

Civil Society Engagement Sr. Manager

Netherlands

Biography

Adam is responsible for ICANN's relations with civil society organizations, including academia, and supporting non-commercial participation in ICANN's multi-stakeholder model. Before joining ICANN in December 2014, Adam spent more than two decades as a senior researcher at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan, where he worked on projects related to telecommunications and Internet policy. Adam has been active in policy-making activities for the deployment and development of the Internet since the early-1990s. He was one of the lead civil society representatives during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), establishment of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and NETmundial.

External to ICANN, Adam is a Senior Visiting Researcher, Keio International Center for Internet and Society, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, and Associate Executive Research Fellow, Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

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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."