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Dennis Chang

Staff

GDD Services Program Director

United States of America

Biography

Dennis Chang GDD Services Program Director At ICANN, Dennis is responsible for design and direction of programs to serve the stakeholders. Current programs include policy implementations for Registration Data (EPDP) IGO and INGO Identifiers Protection. Prior to ICANN, Dennis has served in executive leadership roles in Fortune 100 corporations and technology start-ups creating high-tech products including Aircraft Flight Controls, GPS Guidance, Satellite Command & Control, Telephonic Data Switches, Long range EO/IR Sensors, Communications Data Encryption and Information Security Devices. Dennis holds a Computer Engineering degree from University of California, Los Angeles (Birthplace of the Internet), MBA from Pepperdine University, and Advanced Project Management certificate from Stanford University. Dennis currently serves on the board of Project Management Institute Los Angeles.

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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."