Skip to main content
Resources

GDD Accounts and Services Team

The GDD Accounts and Services Team serves several roles. With a global presence, the team collaborates with registry operators and registrars to ensure a secure, stable and resilient gTLD namespace.

Key responsibilities of the GDD Accounts and Services Team include:

Support for Registry Operators and Registrars

  • Serve as their primary point of contact at the ICANN organization
  • Act as an advocate within the ICANN organization and represent needs of both registry operators and registrars to other teams across the organization

Service Design and Launch

  • Develop services to facilitate the processing of requests when registry operators and registrars must inform or request consent or approval from the ICANN organization, per the rights, obligations, and provisions defined in the Registry Agreement and Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
  • Manage the lifecycle of registry and registrar services from planning, design, implementation to maintenance

Implement Consensus Policies

  • Create implementation plans, engage the Implementation Review Team (IRT), and conduct outreach, including communication with the community and relevant stakeholders

Meet the 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."