Skip to main content

Alperen Eken

Stakeholder Engagement Sr. Manager

Netherlands

Biography

Alperen (Alp) Eken works on the strategy and operations of ICANN’s engagement initiatives, ensuring the organization’s global outreach is both cohesive and operationally sound.

Alp’s professional journey began in communications with the American Chamber of Commerce in Istanbul, followed by a role in Government Affairs for Dow Chemical. He later moved into the technical space as a Compliance Analyst for ICANN before transitioning to the banking sector as a Strategy and Process Consultant for QNB. Alp co-founded a CRM startup which he successfully exited. He remains committed to social impact as he chaired a network of youth NGOs spanning six countries, focused on tackling youth unemployment.

Alp holds a Master of Arts in Conflict Management and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University. A multilingual professional, he can speak Turkish, English, and German. Throughout his career, which has come full circle from ICANN Policy and Compliance to his current role in Stakeholder Engagement, he has focused on building scalable operations and fostering strategic growth across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

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."