Session Transcript
Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the The 2nd Meeting of the IGF. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. (Gavel.) >>NITIN DESAI: Clearly, the Web site is very successful in the sense that most workshops are reporting in through the Web site. But I do have one person. I don't know whether others are there who have not yet surfaced who want to report back. And so let's start. We've already waited long enough. So may I just request Emily Taylor. >>EMILY TAYLOR: I'm reporting back from the CENTR workshop which was held this morning called "The Functioning of the Domain Name System." We had a very well-attended session with over 120 people in the room and a multistakeholder panel comprising representatives of country-code registries, government, ICANN, the IANA function, and the Internet Society. And it was moderated by Jeanette Hofmann, who's a member of the Advisory Group. Presentations covered how the domain name system works and also the IANA function, what it is, and the role of the United States government in it. The panel members looked at and examined expectations and gave observations from their different points of view, from government, country-code registries, and the Internet Society. And the panel featured a case study on a collaborative project called the e-IANA, which is really customers and supplier working together to develop a solution to bring on the operational end of how the IANA function works in updating zone file, the root zone file changes, to country-code managers. Various themes emerged, and, in particular, how the relationships between the country-code registries and ICANN have developed and are maturing perhaps as the industry is maturing. These relationships used to be characterized by quite a lot of embattled scenes. But now, as the work is continuing, these relationships are evening out. They are maturing. There was also a very strong sense of respect for local determination and decision-making when it comes to changing the manager of the country code or what we would call redelegation, and that the IANA criteria in this sense are objective and are publicly available. We also looked at the many forms of interaction that there are between country codes and the ICANN IANA. For example, there are regional organizations: CENTR for Europe, APTLD for the Asia-Pacific region, LACTLD for the Latin America region, and AFTLD for Africa. There is also the country-code support organization, ccNSO. And also the Internet Society itself talked about the way that it does outreach and capacity-building for smaller country code registries to kind of get them on their feet. Capacity-building generally emerged as a theme. People were informed, people in the room who perhaps were ccTLD operators were informed about regional organizations that they could get in touch with or involved with. The Internet Society talked about its development and training program, and also it emerged that grants and sponsorship are available to encourage people and aid participation in international meetings. Also, lastly, the effect of automation on the IANA function in strengthening respect for local decision-making was also discussed. In all of these discussions, the importance of participation was emphasized, whether that be through regional organizations such as CENTR in Europe, or through the ICANN arena. Thank you. >>NITIN DESAI: Are there any other workshop organizers who wish to report? Yes? Come. >> Thank you, Chairman. So we had a workshop titled "Towards International Standards for a Truly Multilingual, Global Internet." And that was organized by UNESCO, ICANN, and the ITU. The workshop addressed different areas in relation to the theme of Internet multilingualism. So among the topics, there were discussions about multilingual Internet from developing countries, perspectives, private sector vision regarding demand for multilingual cyberspace, developments in internationalized domain names, IDNs, need for standardization, and the way forward. The panel was -- There were different members representing different stakeholders, from governments, private sector, and international organizations so we had representatives from the governments of Egypt and India talking about national initiatives in the area of multilingualism and the development of content in local languages. There were representatives from the private sector discussing development in relation to applications and different tools that support different languages and multilingual user interfaces. There was also a representative from UNESCO talking about UNESCO's contribution in making more languages available in the cyberspace. A representative from the ITU, noting the importance of multilingual content and the needed cooperation among the different organizations and stakeholders in this area. So the discussions were very good in the sense that they addressed the multilingualism from the broader perspective. The focus was mainly on the area of standardization in languages, character encoding systems, local content development. There were also some questions from the audience around the need and the urgency to have standards and standardization processes at the language level before getting to the Unicode level. And there were agreements among all the participants that a lot of effort and cooperation is needed to make standards more available and mature. So I think that's it on this workshop. >>NITIN DESAI: Thank you. Are there any other? Any questions? Comments to the two reports? No? Thank you. Reporting-in session is over. And in another 25 minutes, the diversity session will start. Thank you. (3:33 p.m.)
