Skip to main content

Joe Catapano

Stakeholder Engagement Sr Manager

United States of America

Biography

Joe is part of ICANN's Global Stakeholder Engagement team, managing ICANN’s engagement with regional stakeholders in the private sector, technical community, academia and public interest organizations in North America. Joe works closely with the Communications and Policy teams to draft position papers and outreach materials to be used in furtherance of the GSE team’s mission and objectives in North America. He leads planning and execution of outreach events in the region, as well as engagement with students and faculty at regional universities.

Prior to his association with ICANN, Joe was a Communications Officer at the United Nations Foundation. He also has held communications positions previously at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) and Pfizer, Inc. Joe obtained his MA in Government from American University and his BA in Communications from Quinnipiac University.

If you are interested in hosting an IMRS instance in North America, please email joe.catapano(at)icann.org.

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."