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Roberto Gaetano

Roberto Gaetano has been an active participant in the Internet and the ICANN policy making process since 1997. As a representative of ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute), he played important roles in the formation of CORE (Council of Internet Registrars), the policy discussions around the U.S. Government's White Paper (International Forum on the White Paper), and the formation of ICANN's original Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO). He served as one of the first chairs of the DNSO General Assembly and has focused his efforts in recent years on bringing to life a constituency for individual users and registrants.

Mr. Gaetano has a degree in Mathematics and an MBA. He has more than 30 years of experience in telecommunications and information technology, acquired working for different organizations in different countries. At present, he is responsible for application development in an international organization. He is fluent in five European languages.

Roberto Gaetano has served 3 years as non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board by the At-Large Advisory Committee.

Roberto Gaetano was selected by the 2006 Nominating Committee to serve as a Board Member. His term runs from the end of the 2006 annual meeting through the conclusion of the ICANN Annual Meeting in 2009.

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."