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Amanda Fessenden

Staff

VP, GDD Accounts and Services

United States of America

Biography

Amanda Fessenden is Vice President of GDD Accounts and Services. In this role, Amanda leads the team responsible for managing ICANN’s relationships and contracts with the global network of generic top-level domain (gTLD) registries and ICANN-accredited registrars in fulfilling their contractual obligations.

Amanda joined ICANN in 2016 as Registry Services and Engagement Manager. Since that time, she has been consistently promoted to greater levels of responsibility. Amanda has successfully collaborated with cross-functional groups in leading the development of ICANN’s strategy to launch and oversee the portfolio of services offered to registries and registrars and the life-cycle of those services. She was promoted to Sr. Director GDD Services in 2024.

Prior to joining ICANN, she served as Director of Registry Business Operations at Uniregistry where she supported the launch of 25 gTLDs and established registrar channel relations.

Amanda holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston University, where she majored in International Relations and French Language and Literature.

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."