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Yazid Akanho

Technical Engagement Senior Specialist

Benin

Biography

Yazid AKANHO has joined ICANN Org as Technical Engagement Specialist for Middle East and Africa (MEA). His main role is to support ICANN org’s technical engagement efforts in the region (trainings, promote DNS standards and best practices, promote research, …). He reports to Adiel Akplogan, VP Technical Engagement at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

Yazid’s professional career started at Benin Telecoms, the national telecom operator, where he worked in data transmission engineering and contributed to the design of FTTx and 4G LTE network projects, before joining MTN Benin where he held several roles including technical lead on several projects.

As a previous ICANN community member, Yazid has been an active Internet evangelist at various forums such as the Benin DNS Forum, fellow researcher at AFRINIC, Universal Acceptance Steering Group, ISOC Benin, AFRALO, Non-commercial Users Constituency (NCUC), and Non-commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) where he has contributed to several initiatives across these groups. Yazid has also served as vice-president of ISOC Benin Chapter.

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."