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Jamie Hedlund

SVP, Contractual Compliance and Consumer Safeguards, and Managing Director – Washington D.C. Office

Biography

Jamie Hedlund is a senior executive with over 20 years of experience in public policy and business development in the communications industry. He currently serves as SVP, Contractual Compliance & Consumer Safeguards and Managing Director - Washington D.C. Office. Previously he served as VP, Strategic Programs and he joined ICANN in January 2010 as the Vice President, Government Affairs - Americas. Prior to joining ICANN, Jamie served as Vice President for Regulatory Affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association, Director of Public Policy at Yahoo!, Senior Corporate Counsel for Federal Government Affairs at T-Mobile and Director, Business Development and Chief of Staff at Level 3 Communications. Jamie holds a law degree from Tulane University and a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University. He is fluent in Spanish and French. He lives in Washington, DC and has three children.

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."