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Silvia Vivanco

Policy Development Support Senior Manager (At Large Regional Affairs)

United States of America

Biography

Ms. Silvia Vivanco is Policy Development Support Senior Manager (At Large Regional Affairs). She joined ICANN in November 2011. Silvia works directly with the RALOs, elected RALO officers and the individual ALSes to support them in their process and policy-related activities within each of the five Geographic Regions recognized by ICANN.

Silvia has extensive knowledge of international business transactions, telecommunications regulations and transactional matters. She was a member of the legal team of a multinational telecommunications company headquartered in the United States, worked as Senior Regulatory advisor at a US-based telecommunications consulting and as Programme Officer at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna, Austria. Silvia holds a Law & Political Science Degree from the University of Lima, Peru and an LLM in International Law from Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington DC. She speaks English, Spanish and has intermediate knowledge of German.

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."