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Rodrigo De La Parra

VP, Stakeholder Engagement & Managing Director - Latin America & Caribbean

Mexico

Biography

A leading voice and advocate for the multistakeholder Internet governance model in Latin America and the Caribbean, Rodrigo de la Parra is a Regional Vice President for ICANN. Based in Mexico City but frequently travelling through the region, Rodrigo is responsible for outreach, support and engagement with user groups, governments, private sector and civil society throughout the diverse region. In his role, he works closely with the Latin American technical community to continue to build a robust Internet infrastructure in the region. Under his leadership, ICANN has opened an engagement center in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the House of the Internet.

With more than 20 years experience as a multicultural executive, Rodrigo served as Director General of Prospective Regulation and Director General for International Cooperation of Mexico's Federal Commission of Telecommunications before joining ICANN in 2011. While at Cofetel, he leveraged his diplomacy skills and deep knowledge of Internet governance structures and ICT to develop public policy and regulation recommendations for new technologies. He was involved with various ICT groups of international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Organization of American States, and the World Trade Organization, among others.

He also represented Mexico on ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee which gives governments a voice in the organization's policy formation. He was a member of the Consultative Committee of NIC. MX, the non-profit operator of Mexico's country-code Top-Level Domain and the registry that manages allocation of Internet Protocol address space to Mexican Internet Service Providers.

Rodrigo has a Master's degree in political economy and international relations from the University of Essex in the UK. He has been a lecturer of International Organizations and Economic Negotiations and a consultant to the Latin American Cooperation for Advanced Networks.

He speaks Spanish, English and French fluently.

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."