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Veni Markovski

Staff

VP, Government Engagement - UN NY and Interim Head of Government and IGO Engagement

United States of America

Biography

Veni Markovski is the head of Government and Intergovernmental Organization Engagement for ICANN. Based in New York, he is the vice-president, responsible for the relations of ICANN with the United Nations, the UN Agencies, and the Permanent Missions to the United Nations.

In September 1990 he started his work on the Internet, as a system operator of the first Sofia-based bulletin-board system, part of FidoNet.
In 1993 Markovski co-founded and for nine years was the CEO of bol.bg - the first commercial Internet service provider in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The company was sold successfully in 2008 to an international investment fund.
In 1995 he co-founded the Bulgarian Internet Society, a non-profit, of which he serves as President and chairman of the Board.
In March 2002 Markovski was appointed as Chairman of the Bulgarian President's IT Advisory Council, a position he held until the President stepped down from office at the end of his second term on January 22, 2012.
In 2005 he was invited to be the senior international projects adviser to the chairman of the governmental Agency for Information Technologies and communications, a position that he held until 2009. He was also adviser to the Bulgarian national cybersecurity coordinator from 2009 till 2013.

Since the beginning of his career, Veni Markovski has been involved in different international organizations and programs on different levels - as project manager, adviser, senior adviser, advocate for policy changes, mediator, board member, etc. He has served on the Boards of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the global Internet Society, ICANN, among others. He was a member of two experts group to the European Commission – the High-Level Expert Group on Fake News and Online Disinformation and the Expert Group on Tackling Disinformation and Promoting Digital Literacy Through Education and Training.

Markovski has graduated the Law School of St. Kliment Ohridski Sofia University.

He has published hundreds of articles in the mainstream and specialized media, and is the author of one book, “Caught in the Net”, published by Sofia University Press in 2018.

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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."