Skip to main content
Profile image for Janis Karklins

Janis Karklins

Staff

Head, Government Engagement

Switzerland

Biography

Ambassador Janis Karklins joined ICANN as Head, Government Engagement on 20 October 2025.

Janis joins ICANN after a long and distinguished career in the Latvian diplomatic service that spanned three decades. Among his notable achievements, Janis served as Latvian Permanent Representative to the United Nations at Geneva, Permanent Representative of Latvia to the Council of Europe, and Latvian Ambassador to France, Andorra, Monaco, and UNESCO. Janis also served as the Assistant Director General of Communication and Information of UNESCO and was founding Director of the NATO Center of Excellence for Strategic Communications. He also was appointed Ambassador at Large on the UN Global Agenda with responsibilities in cybersecurity and climate diplomacy in the Latvian Foreign Ministry.

Janis is a longstanding participant in the Internet governance community, and in ICANN specifically. He served as Vice President of the Preparatory Committee of the Geneva Phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and was President of the Preparatory Committee of the Tunis Phase of WSIS in 2005. He also chaired the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee and served as GAC as liaison to the ICANN Board of Directors from 2007 to 2010. In 2014, the UN Secretary General appointed Janis Chair of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum for two-year term. He also facilitated Phase 2 of the Expedited Policy Development Process for the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data.

In addition, Janis has chaired the WIPO General Assembly, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, the 2018 meeting of High Contracting Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the Arms Trade Treaty 2019 Meeting of the States Parties, and the 2020 Group of Government Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems.

He holds an engineering degree from the Riga Technical University and attended an Executive Education Program for Eastern European diplomats at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

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."