Session
Organizer 1: Adam Peake, ICANN
Organizer 2: Sarmad Hussain, 🔒
Organizer 3: Seda Akbulut, 🔒ICANN org
Organizer 4: Rebecca McGilley, 🔒ICANN
Speaker 1: Theresa Swinehart, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 2: Bhanu Neupane, Intergovernmental Organization, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 3: Manal Ismail, Government, African Group
Speaker 4: Walter Wu, Private Sector, Asia-Pacific Group
Hesham M. AL-Hammad, Saudi Domain Names Director, Communications, Space & Technology Commission, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Sarmad Hussain, Technical Community, Asia-Pacific Group
Seda Akbulut, Private Sector, Eastern European Group
Rebecca McGilley, Technical Community, Intergovernmental Organization
Classroom
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: The classroom format, with its structured seating arrangement and designated panel area, is ideally suited for our session on IDNs and Universal Acceptance. With a panel of experts leading the discussion, the classroom layout fosters a conducive environment for engaging dialogue and knowledge exchange. The 90-minute duration offers ample time to delve deep into the intricacies of IDNs and Universal Acceptance, ensuring that attendees gain a comprehensive understanding of the topics at hand without feeling rushed. A key goal of the workshop is to show participants how they can contribute to resolving the problems of Universal Acceptance. This format encourages active participation and facilitates meaningful connections among stakeholders, fostering a collaborative atmosphere conducive to exploring innovative solutions for enhancing digital inclusivity on a global scale. Additional speakers from the host country have been invited.
1. How does Universal Acceptance adoption contribute to promoting multilingualism on the Internet as part of Internet governance? 2. What are the roles of the different stakeholders (including governments, technical community, academia, and civil society), and how should they collaborate to achieve Universal Acceptance? 3. What is the framework to track the adoption of Universal Acceptance to gauge the progress of multilingualism online?
What will participants gain from attending this session? Participants will learn how local language domain names and email addresses make the Internet multilingual and inclusive, and how the ICANN community, UNESCO and partners are committed to supporting it. They will learn about internationalized domain names and registering domain names and email addresses in local languages to broaden the online inclusion of communities globally. While these options are now technically available, participants will also learn about the technical challenges of using domain names and email addresses in local languages, and stakeholders' roles in addressing these obstacles in making software applications and systems UA-ready. "It takes a village," participants will understand how they and their communities can contribute towards UA adoption. The panelists will also share what indicators may be used to measure progress on UA.
Description:
The Internet must be multilingual to be inclusive. This means the domain names and email addresses we use to navigate and communicate online must also be multilingual – called internationalized domain names (IDNs) and email addresses. In 2005 the WSIS Tunis Agenda committed to the "multilingualization of the Internet", noting the importance of implementing multilingualism in domain names and email addresses. ICANN's global multistakeholder community has deployed 150 top-level domains (TLDs) in 37 languages in 23 scripts. Today we see internationalized domain names, e.g. Thai ยูเอทดสอบ.ไทย, and email addresses, e.g. Japanese めーるてすと@どこでもつかえる.みんな. The new gTLD program continues and is at the heart of the ICANN and its community's plans to introduce more IDN TLDs in the coming years. Despite progress, Universal Acceptance (UA) of domain names and email addresses by Internet applications and services remains a challenge. For example, Arabic email addresses cannot be used to register for a social media application. Less than 10% of popular national or global websites and 23% of deployed email servers are configured to accept email addresses in all local languages, according to ICANN community studies. The ICANN community is working with partners such as UNESCO to address these issues. The session brings together key stakeholders to discuss why Universal Acceptance of domain names and email addresses still presents ongoing challenges. The session will highlight the measures and collaboration needed to enable adoption of UA, and the roles of different stakeholders, including governments, technical community, academia, and civil society, for achieving this goal. The session will also discuss how the governments could use their digital inclusion programs to measure the progress on UA to indicate their progress towards promoting multilingualism for an inclusive Internet.
Universal Acceptance adoption contributes to multilingualism online. The session will identify concrete steps different stakeholders can take to make progress in UA adoption. We will better understand the challenges of UA when seeking solutions, and the best practices we can adopt to address those challenges. The session will also identify mechanisms for stakeholders to collaborate for this purpose. The session will identify how progress on UA adoption can be measured locally and nationally to contribute to making the Internet inclusive globally. This will include identifying the indicators governments could utilize and mechanisms to collect data on these indicators. These findings will be used to update the messaging for the annually organized UA Day events held around the world (https://universalAcceptance.day) to amplify these mechanisms more broadly and globally, and plan follow-up collaborations amongst the different stakeholders.
Hybrid Format: The ICANN community is very experienced in conducting webinars and other sessions in hybrid formats. Materials to prepare potential workshop participants will be made available in good time before the event. We are experienced in creating good online learning forums. The interaction between the onsite moderator and online moderator will ensure seamless communication between onsite and online speakers and attendees. The session structure will be carefully crafted to accommodate the needs of both onsite and online participants. Q&A sessions will be carefully managed to accommodate questions from both onsite and online attendees, ensuring that all voices are heard and valued. We will ensure participants interested in becoming involved in the UA program will have the opportunity to do so - the UA processes are based on inclusive participation.