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Andre Abed

Staff

CIO, Head of Engineering and Information Technology

United States of America

Biography

Andre Abed is a business-centric, people-focused technology and operations executive with multi-industry experience spanning the Internet, media and entertainment, healthcare, manufacturing, education, professional services, retail, and distribution sectors. A collaborative and results-driven leader, Andre is known for building high-performing teams, fostering organizational alignment, and operationalizing technology strategies that deliver measurable business and mission outcomes.

Andre joined ICANN in January 2022 as Vice President, Engineering & Information Technology (IT) – Relationship Delivery Management and currently serves as Chief Information Officer. In this role, he oversees the strategic direction, modernization, and operational effectiveness of ICANN’s global Engineering & IT team. His responsibilities include ensuring that ICANN’s technology platforms and services are secure, resilient, and fit-for-purpose for the ICANN staff, Board, and community. He also provides strategic guidance and engineering support for ICANN’s flagship services – the unique identifier systems, including the ICANN Managed Root Server (IMRS or L-Root).

Prior to joining ICANN, Andre served as Head of Global Technology Operations at Universal Music Group, where he led strategic planning and tactical execution of enterprise technology, including design, engineering, security and compliance, and operational support. He also held the position of Senior Vice President of Technology at NTC, a Deloitte business unit, where he oversaw global IT operations spanning consulting, engineering, enterprise systems, and program management.

Andre earned a B.S. in Computer Science and holds an ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certification, along with multiple technical certifications from Microsoft and other leading technology providers.

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."