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Andrea Beccalli

Stakeholder Engagement Senior Director- Europe

Portugal

Biography

Andrea joined ICANN in 2013. As a member of the Stakeholder Engagement Team, Andrea's responsibilities include working on ICANN's engagement with the European governments, Internet communities, the EU bodies, as well as the European-based IGOs.

Prior to working at ICANN, Andrea served as Policy and Advocacy Manager for the International Federation of Libraries Association and Institutions (IFLA) in The Hague, Netherlands, where he strengthened IFLA relationship with the UN systems and libraries' contribution to the UN Millennium Development Goals. He was also an Associate Expert at UNESCO's Knowledge Societies Division, Communication and Information Sector in Paris, France, where he worked at the Organization's involvement in WSIS, Internet Governance, and negotiated the 2009 partnership agreement between UNESCO and ICANN. In Spring 2012, Andrea worked in Iraq for the NGO Internews EU on a policy study on Internet and Freedom of Expression in the country.

Andrea obtained a MA degree as Fulbright scholar from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts; he also holds a MA in International Relations from the Barcelona Institute of International Studies and a BA in Political Science from the University of Rome, La Sapienza. Furthermore, Andrea holds Certificates in Negotiation from The Harvard Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School. In addition to English and to his native Italian, Andrea speaks fluent French, Spanish and Portuguese.

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."