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Carlos Alvarez

Trust and Public Safety Engagement Director

United States of America

Biography

Carlos leads ICANN's engagement with the trust and public safety communities. His portfolio includes trust-groups, national/defense/police response teams, and organizations like the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), the Global Cyber Alliance or the Cyber Defence Alliance, among others.

His work is focused on materializing ICANN's mandate to help ensure that the DNS remains stable, secure and resilient, by:

-- Providing internal and external stakeholders globally with subject matter expertise on different aspects related to addressing online threats that target or leverage the DNS.
-- Trust-based collaboration with worldwide cyber law enforcement and with the incident response, threat intel and opsec communities.
-- Capability building, via leading ICANN's efforts towards training his target communities in matters related to security and threats against or through the DNS.

Before, he served in ICANN's Contractual Compliance Team where he managed the team responsible for processing all registrar-related complaints worldwide. He also provided key subject matter expert advice and guidance to ICANN's Contractual Compliance Audit Program and to the gTLD registry-related work of the Compliance Team.

Prior to joining ICANN, Carlos participated in the International Attorneys Program at Holland & Knight in Miami and served as the head of Legal & Business Affairs at Sony Music for Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru. While in this position he was a member of the Andean legal committee of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

A pioneer in Latin America in matters related to software anti-piracy, information security from a legal perspective and cyber crime, initially through his work with the local law firm of the Business Software Alliance in Colombia since 1998. His articles on piracy and terrorism, cybercrime, botnets, digital evidence, criminal aspects of the use of honeypots, legal aspects of information security standards, the Budapest Convention, and other related matters have been published in Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. He taught computer law, legal aspects of information security and intellectual property in two universities in Bogota and has lectured before many different audiences in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Carlos is a member of the Board of Directors of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), a Strategic Advisor to the Global Cyber Alliance, and he is a co-founder of the DNS Abuse Special Interest Group (SIG) at FIRST. He founded the Anti-Phishing SIG at M3AAWG and was its chair while it existed, then co-founded the DNS Abuse SIG that later became the Names and Numbers Committee, that he continues to chair to date.

Carlos is an attorney graduated from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. He holds a Master of Laws degree from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, and has studies on networking with TCP/IP from UCLA.

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."