Skip to main content
Profile image for Karla Hakansson

Karla Hakansson

Staff

GDD Programs Senior Director

United States of America

Biography

Karla Hakansson joined ICANN in November 2016, bringing with her a wealth of experience in the domain name industry. With a career spanning over 15 years, Karla has played a pivotal role in shaping global marketing and partnership strategies within the domain space. Before joining ICANN, Karla served as the Director of Global Channel Marketing at Verisign, where she was responsible for developing and managing channel marketing programs across a vast global network of registrars. Her leadership in this role helped strengthen Verisign’s position in the industry while fostering strong partnerships with key players in the domain ecosystem.
Following her tenure at Verisign, Karla took on the role of Director of Partner Management at GoDaddy, where she led the onboarding of new gTLD registry operators. Her expertise in strategic partnerships and operational excellence ensured a seamless integration process for new registries, helping expand GoDaddy’s domain portfolio and enhance its industry relationships. At ICANN, Karla continues to leverage her deep industry knowledge to support the organization’s mission of ensuring a stable, secure, and unified global internet. Her extensive experience in channel marketing, registry operations, and partner management makes her a valuable asset in driving engagement with stakeholders across the domain name system.
With a passion for innovation and collaboration, Karla remains committed to fostering a dynamic and inclusive digital landscape, working closely with registrars, registries, and the broader ICANN community to navigate the evolving internet ecosystem.

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."