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Heidi Ullrich

Staff

Sr. Director At Large

United States

Forum Profile

    Biography

    Dr. Heidi Ullrich is Director for At-Large, where she is responsible for leading the team that provides the Secretariat and policy advice development support for the community of Individual Internet Users engaged in ICANN ("At-Large"). She joined ICANN as Manager, At-Large Regional Affairs in December 2008. In that role she was responsible for supporting the activities of the At-Large community at the regional level.

    Prior to joining ICANN, she worked with international non-governmental organizations in program management and policy coordination positions strengthening the participation of stakeholder groups in negotiations at the domestic, regional, and international levels. Heidi served as a Program Officer in Trade in Services at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development where she helped to manage multiple international projects on trade in services and sustainable development. At Consumers International, she served as the Global Trade Program Coordinator responsible for the implementation of a multi-million dollar global trade and poverty alleviation program, and also helped support a project surveying the credibility of the Internet from a consumer perspective.

    Previous to her work with non-governmental organizations, Heidi lectured at the University of Southampton and the London School of Economics, where she also received her PhD. She taught such courses as economic diplomacy and international relations, and has participated in various international research projects, including a study on civil society and accountable global governance.

    Heidi is based at ICANN's headquarters in Los Angeles, California.

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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."