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Masanobu Katoh

Masanobu Katoh is Group President, Intellectual Property Group and Security Export Control Headquarters, of Fujitsu, in charge of law, intellectual property, compliance, export control, and law and policy issues. He began his professional career in Legal Division of Fujitsu Limited, a Japanese global information technology company, in charge of general corporate legal issues including contract, antitrust, corporation, financial, international trade, antitrust, securities and intellectual property laws; for two years was assigned to a multinational law firm in San Francisco, working on an international arbitration property laws; moved to Washington, D.C. office to work on all public policy issues such as intellectual property policy and legal matters, international trade disputes, science and technology policy, competition policy and electronic commerce issues. Published numerous articles on intellectual property laws, electronic commerce related laws (e.g. privacy protection, electronic signature and authentication, electronic contracts) and telecommunication policy; co-author of a book "Interfaces on Trial," Westview, (1995), analyzing copyright protection for computer programs. He is an active participant in numerous organizations currently addressing public policy issues affecting the information technology industry.

Mr. Katoh serves as the Chairman of the Electronic Commerce Committee of the Forum for the Global Information Infrastructure (GIIC). He is also Chairman of the Internet Law and Policy Forum (ILPF); the U.S. Japan Business Council, the World Information Technology Services Alliance (WITSA), the International Information Industry Congress (IIIC), and the Alliance for Global Business (AGB).

Mr. Katoh received his Bachelors of Law degree at the University of Tokyo and his. Masters of Law degree from the University of Michigan Law School.

Mr. Katoh was elected as an ICANN director in November 2000, having been chosen to represent the Asia-Pacific region in the At-Large voting process conducted in October 2000. His term expired 26 June 2003. He was then elected by the nominating committee to serve through the 2003 annual meeting. Prior to his service on the Board of Directors, he was the Asia-Pacific representative of the business constituency on the Names Council of the former Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO), which was responsible for developing and recommending policies concerning the Internet's technical management of domain names.

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."