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Elena Plexida

Vice President, Government and IGO Engagement

Belgium

Biography

Elena Plexida is Vice President for Government and IGO Engagement at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Prior to joining ICANN, Elena worked for the European Commission DG CONNECT on internet governance issues. Before that, she was a Telecom Attaché with the Permanent Representation of Greece to the EU. During the Greek Presidency of the Council of the EU, Elena co-chaired the Council Working Party on Telecommunications and Information Society. Before joining the Permanent Representation, Elena was an international affairs officer at the Hellenic Ministry of Telecom. Her main responsibilities included EU affairs and relations of the country with a number of international organizations.

Elena has a degree in economics and political science. She is also a graduate of the National School of Public Administration of Greece (ESDD). She is currently following a master’s program at the National (Metsovian) Technical University of Athens.

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."