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George Conrades

George Conrades is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Akamai Technologies, Inc. and also serves as a venture partner at Polaris Venture Partners, an early stage investment company.

He had been Executive Vice President and President, GTE Internetworking since the acquisition of BBN by GTE in 1997. He was also Chief Executive Officer of BBN (1994-98). At GTE, George was responsible for creating GTE Internetworking and leading GTE's rapid growth in the data and Internet Business, including integrated telecommunications services. From 1994 until GTE's acquisition of BBN, Conrades served as Chief Executive Officer of BBN, the highly regarded technology research and development firm, rapidly building the company into one of the industry's top tier ISPs. BBN helped build the ARPANET, the forerunner to today's modern Internet.

Previously, he was with IBM for thirty-one years, including IBM United States and IBM Asia/Pacific in Tokyo. At IBM, he was Senior Vice President and a member of IBM's Corporate Management Board.

He is former Chairman of the Board of Ohio Wesleyan University, a trustee of The Scripps Research Institute, a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development, and chair of the subcommittee report on the importance of basic research in America. Previously, he served as director for several companies in health care, bio-pharmaceuticals and high technology, and is a member of the board of Viacom and Infinity Broadcasting.

Mr. Conrades holds a Bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Ohio Wesleyan University (1961) and a M.B.A. from the University of Chicago (1971).

He was appointed as one of ICANN's nine initial directors in October 1998. He served until November 2000.

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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."