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Ashwin Rangan

SVP, Engineering and Chief Information Officer (CIO)

United States of America

Biography

Ashwin ("Ash") Rangan joined ICANN as Chief Innovation and Information Officer (CIIO) in March 2014. He joins the ICANN staff with over 20 years of experience serving in progressive capacities up to the Head of IT in a variety of organizations, both very large and relatively small. Ash is known as a visionary, strategist and leader in applying creative and innovative IT solutions to the ever-evolving needs of businesses and organizations. He has served as CIO at several well known brands such as Rockwell International, and Wal-Mart and most recently at Edwards Lifesciences. He is a sought-after expert in defining, developing and delivering high-value process innovations.

At ICANN, he serves as the SVP Engineering & Chief Information Officer. He works closely with the ICANN Operations teams in the US, Turkey, Singapore, Uruguay and other regional operations teams.

Ash's responsibilities at ICANN include ensuring high-availability of IT-enabled services. He manages staff who are responsible for IT Governance and project management, IT Security, IT Infrastructure, community-facing solutions, and staff-facing operations-management systems. He also provides leadership, management and strategic guidance to the L-Root operations team.

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."