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Ambassador Janis Karklins

Ambassador Karklins was appointed to the ICANN Board of Directors in March 2007, and at the same time assumed the post of Chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee and liaison from the GAC to the ICANN Board.

Before assuming duties in Paris as Latvian ambassador to France and UNESCO in September 2007, ambassador Karklins has served as the Permanent Representative of Latvia to the United Nations in Geneva for seven years. During that time, he has served as the First Vice-Chairman and year later as Chairman of the Council of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), has held several elected posts in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and UN Commission of Science and Technology for Development, as well as presided over the Group of Governmental Experts on Cluster Munitions in the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). He also served as the Vice-President of the Preparatory Committee of the Geneva Phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and President of the Preparatory Committee of the Tunis Phase of WSIS.

Prior to taking his current post in Geneva, he served as the Undersecretary of State in Latvia. Previously, he served as Counselor in the Latvian Embassies in both France and Finland. He has an engineering degree from the Riga Technical University in Latvia and attended an executive education program for Eastern European diplomats at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in the USA.

Ambassador Karklins' second two-year term will end in 2011.

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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."