8th November 2006

NEW FORUM HOLDS FIRST MEETING ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE

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Spam, cybercrime, online freedom of expression, security, multilingualism, and bridging the ‘digital divide’ are some of the issues participants addressed at the inaugural meeting of a new UN-sponsored forum on internet governance.

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), created by the UN World Summit on the Information Society, met in Athens from 30 October - 2 November to focus on ‘internet governance for development.’ The IGF is mandated to foster “the sustainability, robustness, security, stability, and development of the internet.” It is not a decision-making body, but simply a forum for discussion and building multi-stakeholder coalitions on how the internet could best be used to fight crime and promote public goals such as access to knowledge.

The 1200-odd participants from the private sector, civil society, academia, and the technical community held a wide range of panel discussions focused on four broad themes — openness, security, diversity and access.

One issue that garnered much attention was the existing specification that domain names be comprised of characters from the Latin alphabet. Many participants agreed that allowing people to use the internet in their own language was a necessary step to broadening access in poor countries. “The new society leaves people isolated, marginalised. I think the digital divide is not as important as the linguistic divide,” said Adama Samassékou, President of the African Academy of Languages.

Nitin Desai, who heads the IGF, explained that “the big expansion in the internet in the next five years is going to take place in developing countries. A lot of it in countries which are not English speaking … where people don’t even know the Latin alphabet, for instance, China”

However, technical experts called the transition to multi-lingual domain names a “huge technical challenge.” “This is like changing the bricks in the basement of a multi-storey building,” said Paul Twoney, president of the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees internet domain names.

The next meeting of the IGF is scheduled for November 2007 in Brazil.

ICTSD Reporting; “UN delegates: English isn’t good enough,” CNET NEWS, 1 November 2006; “Double-byte domains a risk,” AUSTRALIAN IT, 31 October 2006; “Asia to lead web growth: UN Internet chief,” INDIATIMES.com, 30 October 2006.