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Russ Weinstein

SVP, Policy Development Support

United States of America

Biography

Russ Weinstein is the Senior Vice President, Policy Development Support. He leads a global team responsible for facilitating the development of policy recommendations and related advice by ICANN's multistakeholder community, as part of ICANN's mission to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems. Russ brings to his role more than 20 years of experience and success in building relationships, engaging diverse stakeholders, leading programs and teams to implement policy and advice, and creating scalable operations.

Joining ICANN in October 2012 to support the New gTLD Program, Russ has since held management roles of increasing responsibility. Promoted to Vice President, GDD Accounts and Services in 2020, he managed ICANN’s relationships and contracts with gTLD Registries and ICANN-Accredited Registrars.

Before ICANN, Russ worked in the aerospace industry, gaining experience in business operations, finance, contract administration, and supply chain management. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and an MBA from the University of Southern California.

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."