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Chris Mondini

VP, Stakeholder Engagement & Managing Director - Europe

Belgium

Biography

Chris Mondini is Vice President, Stakeholder Engagement, Europe and Managing Director for Europe, stationed in the Brussels, Belgium office. In his role, Mondini oversees ICANN org’s operations in the region and leads ICANN org’s Global Business Engagement initiatives worldwide.

Christopher began his professional life as a United States diplomat and later became a corporate investigator with Deloitte. He has investigated the world’s largest corporate corruption cases, while working with NGOs and business organizations on ways to mitigate corruption risks. He also led grant-making teams for the Full Circle Fund, an engaged philanthropy organization addressing economic development challenges. Christopher holds degrees from Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. Throughout his career in Washington and Silicon Valley, he has dedicated his career to bridging communications gaps that occur among diverse sectors -- public, private and nonprofit – and across international borders.

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."