Internet Governance Forum Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 13 November 2007 Afternoon
 Session Reporting Back
 
 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.)