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Mert Saka

GDD Accounts Senior Manager

Türkiye, Republic of

Biography

Mert Saka joined ICANN in May 2014 as Business Manager for the Registry Services Team. He currently serves as a GDD Accounts Senior Manager based in ICANN’s Istanbul office, working with ICANN's Contracted Parties (gTLD registry operators and ICANN-accredited registrars), registry service providers, and other stakeholders across the domain name industry.

With more than 20 years of international experience in information technology, global services, and account management, Mert brings a combination of technical understanding, operational experience, and stakeholder-focused engagement to his role. He has extensive experience working with distributed teams and supporting relationships across emerging and global markets.

Mert holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronics Engineering. Alongside his account management responsibilities, he contributes to market intelligence, data analysis and new technology initiatives related to the domain name market and ICANN’s work with the Contracted Parties.

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."