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Bob Ochieng

Sr. Director, New gTLD Subsequent Procedures

Kenya

Biography

Bob is a Telecommunications Engineer with over 15 year’s experience in the multi-disciplinary Telecoms/ICT industry with skills and strengths in Internet Public Policy development, Government Engagement as well as Project and Operations Management. Bob joined ICANN in 2013 from PwC Kenya where he was a Senior Consultant in Technology – East Africa hub. Prior to this he worked in several multinational Companies including British American Tobacco (BAT) Kenya, Orange Telecom Kenya as well as the Kenya Network Information Centre (KeNIC), the dot KE registry amongst others.

Bob holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Technology, an MBA in Strategic Management and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and a Certified Cisco Network Associate (CCNA). In this capacity, Bob is responsible for the Implementation of the Subsequent Round of ICANN’s New gTLD (Generic Top Level Domain) Program, Via the introduction of new top-level domains in multiple languages and scripts, this program aims to enhance innovation, competition and consumer choice in the Internet’s Domain Name System.

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."