Internet Governance Forum 1 November 2006

 Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the
 The Inaugural Meeting of the IGF, in Athens. 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.


 - Diversity Session -



 >>CHAIRMAN VASSILEV:  Good morning. Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, excuse
 us for the small delay. The first panel was slightly late, and then now we just
 asked all the participants to sit in a certain order. So now we can continue
 with the next panel, which is called "Diversity." And the subtheme is promoting
 multilingualism in local content. First of all, let me introduce all of the
 participants first of all, our moderator, Mr. Yoshinori Imai, from the Japan
 broadcasting corporation, or NHK. I'll started from the other end of the table.
 The first participant is Mr. Andrzej Bartosiewicz from Poland, which is is
 chairman of the IDN group within the study group number 17 of ITU-T. Next to
 him is Mr. Julian Casasbuenas from Colombia, he's the director of Colnodo, a
 member of the Association of Progressive Communication. The next participant is
 Mr. Alex Corenthin, manager of NIC Senegal and president of ISOC Senegal. The
 next participant is Mr.  Patrik Faltstrom from Stockholm, Sweden. He's a
 consulting engineer from Cisco Systems and a member of the Internet Engineering
 Task Force, also a member of the Swedish government I.T. Policy and Strategy
 Group. Next to him is Ms. Divina Frau-Meigs, a professor of media sociology at
 University of Paris 3 in Sorbonne, France. Next to me is Professor Qiheng Hu,
 or Madam Hu, who is chairman of the Internet Society of China. On my left, Mr.
 Nurul Kabir, who is the CEO and founder of Spinnovation Limited. Mr. Keisuke
 Kamimura, from Glocom in Tokyo, Japan. Next to him is Ms. Elizabeth Longworth,
 who is the executive director of the office of the director general of UNESCO.
 Mr. Riyadh Najm from Saudi Arabia, assistant deputy minister, ministry of
 culture and information in Saudi Arabia, and he is also the president of the
 technical committee of the world broadcasting union. And also Mr. Adama
 Samassekou, who is the president of the African Academy of Languages in Bamako
 in Mali. My name is Nikolay Vassilev, I am from Bulgaria, just to the north of
 Greece. I am the Minister of State Administration and Administrative Reform. I
 suggest the following order of participation. First, I'll make a relatively
 short introductory statement. Then I'll give the floor to our moderator. And,
 of course, all the panelists, then all the people from the hall. And, of
 course, I'll reserve my rights as a participant also to make a short speech at
 some point in time. So first of all, to be honest, I was very happy to accept
 the invitation of our host, minister Michalis Liapis, the minister of transport
 and communications for Greece, also an old friend. And the invitation of Greece
 to host this very important event for all of us. This forum is an excellent
 opportunity for people from all over the world, people very deeply involved in
 communications, in I.T, in the development of Internet, and also in government
 policy, as well as from the private and academic sectors, to exchange views and
 opinions, especially considering the very difficult, to some extent
 controversial, topic of our panel. In this session, we will focus on some of
 the key principles for building an open information society. The ability of
 users to use the Internet in their own language, when possible, and with their
 native alphabet, if possible, of course. Also, the other themes are mainly
 openness, access, and security. Let me quote something that all participants
 agreed in Tunisia last year. We agreed to work earnestly towards
 multilingualization of the Internet, and also to support local content
 development, translation and adaptation, digital archives, and diverse forms of
 digital and traditional media. Today, we will discuss many topics in this area.
 In my list, I have at least seven ones, seven topics, but, of course, we'll
 leave this to all the participants. So now let me give the floor to our
 moderator, from Japan, Mr. Yoshinori Imai, from the Japan broadcasting
 corporation. Mr. Moderator.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, today, more
 than one billion people use the Internet. Many of these people cannot read or
 write in English. They use languages which do not come from Latin alphabet.
 Some 90% of 6,000 languages used in the world today are not represented on the
 Internet. People in those countries could be left out in the desert of no
 information and no knowledge, without any means to acquire them. Knowledge and
 information are basic elements of well-being, social transformation, human
 development, and democracy. A key element of promoting multilingualism on the
 Internet is creating the ability of information in local languages. Building
 the capacity of both individuals and institutions in creating local content is
 the must. In discussing this, let us keep these things in mind:  Inclusion of
 the rest of the five billion people into the global community of the Internet
 for development. The domain names are also the topic today. They cannot display
 characters not contained in ASCII. To develop Internationalized Domain Names,
 or IDNs, while preserve the security and stability of the domain name system is
 the challenge. The challenge includes difficult technological and policy
 choices. Those are the areas we will steer through today in this session. To
 discuss the topic today, we will have a slightly structured interchange between
 the panelists here, and we would like to encourage all the audience here to
 take part in the discussion. The format is already laid out by my two
 predecessors, who made the first two sessions very, very successful. I will
 basically follow the style. But part of my brain should be devoted to the
 transition between Japanese and English. And please bear with my Japanese
 so-called little white way of running the session. As I from time to time call
 upon your participation from the audience, but will not be able to call on
 everyone, so please look around you and find volunteers if you have your
 opinion and comments to address. They will come to you. And please hand them
 one of -- hand one of them your business card with the theme of your question
 or opinion, or you will write a memo with your name and brief -- briefly with
 your comments or questions that I can read. And the people around me, the
 members of the advisory committee, will sort out and give me the questions, and
 then I will ask the panel. And from time to time, we will encourage this kind
 of interchange. And we have also feedback from outside the hall, through the
 Internet, who are connected by webcast, which is already going on. And others
 can send in e-mails to the Web site we prepared for the people from outside.
 And new system is introduced today, which is telephone text and message can be
 sent to us. Two phones for English and French questions have been set up, and
 IGF volunteers will check all messages sent and relay the best of them to the
 moderator while the session is in progress. For English questions, text -- I
 call the numbers -- plus 30-697 680 6260. Repeat, plus 30-697 680 6260. French
 -- I'm sorry, I cannot read well, but I will give you the number in English.
 Plus 30-697 182 and 1854. 30-697 182 1854. Now, what I should do is to start
 the discussion by asking you again, all the panelists, to state your name and
 affiliation, and give us briefly your idea of diversity to start with. So,
 Andrzej, will you start first.

 >>ANDRZEJ BARTOSIEWICZ:  Okay. Just maybe briefly introducing myself and
 putting this in the context of the meeting, I'm .PL registry, and therefore my
 focus is domain name system. If we are talking about diversity, from my
 perspective, Internationalized Domain Names are the key issue so allowing
 non-English-speaking people to create their addresses, names, especially domain
 names, in the future, the whole e-mail addresses, in their languages. I'm
 acting as rapporteur for IDN issues in ITU. And from my perspective, our
 activity within ITU is to facilitate the process. ICANN is playing the key role
 in the standardization and facilitation. Of course, the IETF and other groups.
 And what we are doing, we are focusing not on creating standards. We are
 focusing on facilitating (inaudible), we are focusing on rising awareness about
 the security risk, et cetera. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. Next, please.

 >>JULIAN CASASBUENAS:  Thank you very much. I would like to give you my
 viewpoint on the use of the Internet by groups which are more isolated, because
 we do have a lot of experience in Colombia. And I think this -- this culture
 should become known to everyone through the use of new technology. As far as
 culture diversity and inclusion is concerned, in countries like mine, Colombia,
 for example, there's a fear about exchanging the -- exchanging the cultural
 heritage and traditional knowledge of our indigenous groups. And they also try
 to set up mechanisms to protect this information. Fortunately, we do see that
 some progress has been made, and the flow of information is moving more freely.
 This allows local groups to feel able to exchange knowledge and views and feel
 more comfortable about it and also reap the benefits of new technology, which
 means including with free software new content online, and also to facilitate
 the production and dissemination of this information.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. Please.

 >>ALEX CORENTHIN:  Thank you. I would also be part of the diversity of this
 panel, because I will speak French, which is the third language you will be
 hearing from us. I am from Dakar university, and my main line of interest is
 multilingualism. I also have another hat. And I am the president of ISOC
 Senegal. So technical developments in the field are part of my mandate. Now, in
 Senegal, we have lots of oral languages that don't have an alphabet and use,
 for example, the Roman alphabet or the Arabic alphabet. And it's very difficult
 for them to get their content on the Internet. This is a very strong challenge
 to them. And we have to find a way for all these communities, which have been
 isolated in the past, to have their own voice on the Net. We have to find tools
 which will take into account the linguistic and cultural diversity of these
 people to codify their languages in whichever way possible in order for their
 content to also be present. We also face a second difficulty. It's also having
 a great number of languages within the same region or the same nation. In
 Senegal, we have 13 codified languages. And for us experts, it's obvious that
 it's very hard to give equal value to all of these languages in the same
 region. And access is made more difficult by the fact that we don't have a
 common language which can be used. There's also another point:  Illiteracy.
 Often, in developing countries, we have people who are illiterate or cannot use
 French, for example, which is an international language. So they might be
 illiterate in French, but they know how to write their own language. So they
 can communicate in their language, but not in a foreign tongue, although it's
 used by us. So it's quite difficult for them to transcribe their languages, for
 example, in the Roman alphabet. So we shouldn't think of these people as truly
 illiterate. We should say that they also have to be given an opportunity to
 access and use the Web. They have to be able to find a way of expressing their
 identity on the Internet, their particular identity, because if we give them
 access to the Internet, we also have to give them access in a language they can
 use. Thank you.

 >>PATRIK FALTSTROM:  Good morning. So apart from all the other things I'm
 doing, I'm also a member of the ISOC board of trustees, and also my native
 language is none of the seven that is actually translated to here, but I'll do
 the best I can. So when coming towards the IGF, I heard a lot of talk about
 IDN. And I was a little bit nervous that the IDN would be the only thing people
 would want to talk about in this panel. As the author of the IDN standard or
 one of us who has been working with it, I really wanted to talk about IDN, of
 course, but more importantly, about the other issues that I see important with
 diversity. First of all, I would like to emphasize what Vint Cerf said
 yesterday, and that is that we have to remember that Internationalized Domain
 Names are really identifiers. And, unfortunately, it is the case that no
 language and no script and no person will be happy with the definition of
 identifiers if it is the case they think that they can express words and
 sentences. Everyone will be unhappy. We just have to find a standard that makes
 people as little unhappy as possible. But with that, I will actually leave and
 not talk about IDN anymore today if it's not the case I get explicit questions.
 Instead, I want to move over to the other important thing, that is the ability
 to create content that we already heard so many people talk about today. And
 that has to do with the third very important thing, that is the ability to be
 able to get operating systems, tools and software, translated into the local
 language and expressed in a script which people then can read. And this leads
 to another very important thing, and that is the question of what languages can
 actually be expressed in writing, like we just heard our previous person say.
 And even if you can type things in -- using the Latin script that, for example,
 is used in -- for many African languages, it's still the case that we have many
 illiterate people. So the overall problems, I think, have to do with the
 ability to translate information and actually make people express themselves in
 multiple languages. If we look at Sweden as one example, we have seven official
 languages. And out of those seven, six of them are protected by law. Can you
 guess which one is not protected? That is Swedish. Okay. So, to -- so -- and I
 have no idea why. But the only country which -- where, actually, Sweden is
 protected by law is in Finland. [ Laughter ]

 >>PATRIK FALTSTROM:  But what is more interesting is that one of the protected
 languages in Sweden is actually the sign language that blind people use. And
 it's -- of course, there is a script that you can use with sign language. But
 it's extremely complicated and not really what people want to use. And that
 leads me to some very interesting applications that we have seen that --
 actually, or solutions. One, I think, is Wikipedia, that we now see actually
 exists in, like, 250 languages or -- sorry, 150 languages or something. We will
 see a lot of evolution on Wikipedia. How come we have to write the same article
 multiple times? We can do a lot of work there. We need to do automatic
 translation tools. Second very important application, I think, is YouTube.
 YouTube is a very good example where people, just by clicking, can upload a
 video and also watch videos. You don't have to read and write to use those kind
 of tools. And I think we will see more of that. So with the correct tools and
 with the ability to have some kind of automatic translation tools and local
 support and capacity-building regarding these tools, I think with these tools,
 we will see content being created. And with that, we get more information, and
 information will be exchanged by the people that understand whatever language
 is in use. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Please.

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  Good morning. I'm Divina Frau-Meigs. In the program, it
 says that I am a professor of media sociology at the university of Sorbonne.
 That's true. But I'm also here because I also represent two civil society
 associations:  The international society for ICT research, I'm it's president,
 and I would like to represent the view of researchers here; and also of the
 educational coalition for higher education and research, which has been a part
 of the civil society family throughout the process. And we've also always
 functioned in three languages, because we would also -- always like to include
 participants from Africa and Latin America. We do a lot of work on education.
 But I've also taken part on all discussions and panels and committees, trying
 to promote cultural diversity. And this is a viewpoint I'd like to put through
 to you today, because we have three basic pillars. First of all, democracy. And
 setting up a culture of -- whereby you can use your own language and that will
 be considered part of your human rights. Secondly, sustainable development to
 take into account all delocalization problems. And also, thirdly, setting up
 equitable relations between all partners, and especially the minority ones. So
 that's my viewpoint and that's how I will focus my participation on this
 discussion. So I'm wearing two hats. And as part of the educational system, our
 coalition has tried to promote educational access, make it open and free. There
 are a lot of technical and linguistic problems to achieve this, because it's
 quite hard to guarantee to transfer it into all languages. But we do need this
 if we want to achieve full content creation and the ability and the capacity
 for all to participate. We want the reality of natural languages to be taken
 into account and to use tools which have been very useful for oral cultures,
 for example, use telephony and also use very technologies on the web. We would
 like to make a suggestion.  We should explore more what goes on with these new
 tools which allow people to use free and natural speech.  And use domain names
 which will offer added value.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  May I just interrupt you, ma'am. The first five, six people
 spoke a little longer than I expected. Would you be a little more concise?  I
 would like to be fair to all of you, but I will give time afterwards to the
 rest of the people. And I would like to ask all of you in the hall to prepare
 your questions, and if you find the attendants around here, please hand them to
 the people around.  And then we've got them here.  And after everybody finishes
 the introduction, we will first come back to you in the hall. Yes, please,
 madam.

 >>QIHENG HU:  Good morning, everyone.  Actually, I'm not an expert on the use
 of multilingual domain names just because I'm the chairman of CNNIC Steering
 Committee. So I understand certain situation of domain names in Chinese and
 Chinese domain names and international domain names, multilingual domain names.
 I believe that diversity of cultures and languages on the Internet is an issue
 of vital importance. For instance, in my country, there are dozens of ethnic
 groups.  How to maintain their cultural traditions, their languages, their
 customs and practices?  This issue has been the agenda of the country all
 along. Of course, the world of Internet way should also try to preserve
 diversity of cultures and languages.  Internationalized Domain Names cannot
 resolve the issue of diversity entirely.  However, it's part of the efforts,
 and an important part of efforts. Concerning international domain names, I
 think there should be some limits.  In China there are dozens of ethnic groups.
  We cannot, it's not possible to establish domain names in dozens of ethnic
 languages so that every ethnic group can use their own language to access the
 net. Ethnic groups can use Chinese as their language.  If there are too many
 languages, the domain names in many languages can threaten the stability and
 security of the current domain name system. Therefore, in my view, how to
 strike a balance.  Between domain names in many languages and the security and
 stability of the domain name system has to strike a balance.  We must formulate
 a good policy, and such a policy should be the result of common efforts between
 different countries, different nationalities, and Internet circles so that we
 can maintain diversity and also the stability of the net. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Nurul, please.

 >>NURUL KABIR:  Thank you.  Good morning, everybody.  Thank you for giving me
 the opportunity to share my views here in this global forum. My name is Nurul
 Kabir.  I am from Bangladesh, the country which is actually fight for language.
  You know that during 1952, there was a movement to fight for the language for
 during the Pakistan period in Bangladesh, previously Pakistan.  So people fight
 for language and died many people in 21st February 1952. Eventually, UNESCO
 declared 21st February the model language day. So the rule from Bangladesh is a
 unique example that people would like to share their opinion and their
 information by their own language.  In this technological development and
 Internet society, there is, I found, a divide. How we like to mitigate that
 divide to introduce the local language in Internet?  I would like to speak in
 that areas, and also how to create opportunities to use in a local language in
 the more people in the world, those who are not privileged to use Internet.
 Thank you.

 >>KEISUKE KAMIMURA:  Good morning, my name is Keisuke Kamimura from the center
 of global communications in Tokyo, and I am a researcher for --

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Would you put the microphone a little closer?

 >>KEISUKE KAMIMURA:  Sure.  We are specializing in telecoms and Internet policy
 issues such as competition, regulation and Digital Divide, among others.  And I
 think I am on this panel for two reasons.  For one thing, I am here probably
 for the sake of ethnic and geographic diversity, per se.  Maybe not, because we
 have two Japanese on stage already.  And for another, I am here to bring a
 little bit of linguistics perspective to this discussion this morning. And I
 see we have a number of IDN experts on the panel, but I am somewhat proud of
 being a non-expert on this issue.  And I tend to think that there are lots of
 other issues on top of IDN in ensuring multilingualism on cyberspace.  To me,
 in discussing diversity, language is the most important element, and this is
 not because I have little bit of linguistics background but because it is
 through language we participate in any social, economic, and cultural activity,
 whether off-line or online. So if we are not comfortable and confident with the
 tools we are using, we would be practically excluded from participating in
 Information Society at all.  We want to express ourselves in our own language,
 and cyberspace, it's not about content alone, but also it is about production
 and generation of content as well. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you.

 >>ELIZABETH LONGWORTH:  Good morning.  My name is Liz Longworth.  I am the
 executive director of the office of the director general of UNESCO.  That's the
 United Nations Organization for Education, Sciences, Culture and Communication.
  We have 191 member states. The moderator asked what does diversity mean to us,
 and so from a UNESCO perspective, first I would like to remind everybody if we
 are talking of Internet Governance, there is an international framework out
 there, and I am referring to two international instruments:  The universal
 declaration on cultural diversity, and there's another one called the
 recommendation on multilingualism and universal access signed by the member
 states of the United Nations. More specifically in terms of what it means,
 diversity means for us, sharing of knowledge goes to the heart of the UNESCO
 mandate.  So when we talk about diversity, we're talking about the ability of
 users and participants on the Internet to express their culture, to reflect
 their culture and their identity.  Diversity has notions of being
 representative.  It's about who we are:  Women, youth, people with
 disabilities, indigenous. It's about being plural, it's about richness, it's
 about being local.  Like biodiversity is to nature, diversity on the Internet
 must reflect, and does reflect, the whole spectrum of human endeavor, both past
 and future. And finally, of course, it reflects our cultures, our experiences,
 our perspectives, our religions, our values.  And most importantly, without
 diversity on the Internet, you cannot have access, you cannot have
 participation.  It's one of the major tools we have to fight intolerance and to
 overcome negative stereotypes. And I think if we can reflect the diversity as
 the key principle of Internet Governance, then we can tap into the richness of
 our human race.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you.

 >>RIYADH NAJM:  Thank you.  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.  I am Riyadh
 Najm, Assistant Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Culture and Information in
 Saudi Arabia.  I am also the chairman of the Technical Committee for the World
 Broadcasting Union. Now, I am representing here in this panel some of the
 groups that are, you know, to deal with this diversity issue. First, the Arabic
 language, which is one of the issues in the domain names and the ability to
 access the Internet without -- a language that does not have an alphabet that
 are Latin. Also, I am representing the world broadcasting union, and you
 probably know the world broadcasting union is the consortium of all the
 broadcast unions in the world, which covers basically all the geographical
 areas of the world. Among each of these broadcast unions, there are members who
 represent the private sector and who represent the civil society in terms of
 public broadcasters, and who represent government organizations because some of
 the broadcast organizations of the world are government or state owned. The
 world broadcasting union has convened along the side of the WSIS, the first
 session and the second session, world electronic media forum.  There was one in
 2003, and one in 2005. And it is planned to hold a third one in 2007. So when
 we talk now about diversity, I think by having this sort of participation from
 the world broadcasting union, we are really addressing that, the diversity
 issues by having this geographical representation.  We are also having the
 language representation, because basically all the main languages of the world
 are being used in those unions.  And also the cultural and moral values, also
 it is an issue.  And thank you for my colleague from the UNESCO and she really
 defined all the aspects of diversity that we would think about. We really
 should not limit it always to language barrier but all the other aspects that
 can prevent somebody from accessing the Internet freely and transparently. Of
 course the diversity also carries to the handicapped, access to the
 handicapped, the access of the different genders of the society, as well as all
 smaller groups that are not really talked about in this setting.  We have to be
 -- or to have equal, or if not equal, understandable and easy access to the
 Internet. Thank you.

 >>ADAMA SAMASSEKOU:  Good morning.  Good morning.  Good morning (in Russian.)
 good morning (in Spanish and Portuguese). These are the U.N. languages which I
 speak, of course, as well as Greek and my mother tongue. Well, I am Adama
 Samassekou.  I am right now president of the African academy of languages in
 Mali.  So I am an African from Mali.  And I also had the honor of presiding the
 preparatory work for the WSIS in Geneva.  And I believe that our main objective
 today is to promote linguistic diversity, not diversity of human communication.
 I would like to focus on three different pillars today, because when we say
 diversity, for me, to me, it's a philosophical, ethic and political question. 
 It's your world vision which is under question.  A great thinker said that the
 beauty of a carpet lies within the beauty of its colors.  So you can see carpet
 as something uniform or as an explosion of color. The first dimension I would
 like to underline here is linguistic diversity, which is the mother of cultural
 diversity, and linguistic diversity is to human society what biodiversity is to
 nature. I would like to cite Crystal who says it allows species -- biodiversity
 is a way of species to survive in nature.  So this is what linguistic diversity
 does to us. And the most diverse species are the ones which survive best.  So
 for us, it is the -- it's the catalyst which creates the wealth of languages in
 the world. Thousands of languages.  And it shouldn't be thought of as a
 restriction, but as a possibility offered.  In every African country there are
 at least two official languages.  Most times, there are three languages at
 least.  And part of the work of the African academy of languages is to showcase
 this linguistic diversity.  And once again, I have to cite David crystal who
 said that every world vision finds its expression in a language, and every time
 a language dies out, that world vision dies out with it. So the destiny of
 humankind depends on our languages, to a certain degree. Language is the
 linchpin of our collective identity. It's a privileged instrument to know,
 acknowledge, and recognize, to enhance and strengthen relations, to construct
 and build peace and stability. We have to know each other in order to be able
 to recognize each other.  We are in Greece, and from the times of Delphi and
 from Socrates, we have knowledge as importance.  Because in my country we say
 it's good to be able to tell what a flower is, to be able to ride a horse, but
 it's even better to know yourself. So what does diversity mean to us Africans? 
 We need to be able to share knowledge, because this new society leaves people
 isolated, marginalized.  There is a huge part of the world population which are
 voiceless.  I call them voiceless because they are not able to share the
 knowledge which is available.  Because what is Internet?  The Internet is
 access to information, but it's not purely that.  It's also opening up the
 world to people so that people can create knowledge apart from sharing it, not
 just receiving knowledge from without, but also creating it from within. So we
 need to open up participation to other languages, and I think that the Digital
 Divide is not as important as the linguistic divide.  And that's the one we
 should be bridging in order to guarantee the democratic governance of the
 Internet.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  I have received already some questions.  But before going to
 get those audience's questions, may I just go back to the chairman of this
 session, Minister Vassilev just for a brief comment.

 >>NIKOLAY VASSILEV:  Thank you very much.  Mr. Moderator, Mr. Imai, ladies and
 gentlemen, I would like to use also the opportunity as a participant in the
 panel to express a few thoughts in three different areas. One of them is the
 use of English language.  The second one is some problems with local content. 
 And the third one is the issue of transliteration, which I will explain it's
 actually different from translation. Talking about English, now of course all
 of us are people from very different countries, from all the different
 continents.  People from a different background.  Some of us are native English
 speakers, and some, like me, are not. So what do we do?  There are at least
 several different, at least two opposite approaches to this issue.  The
 approach of some technicians, maybe people who are technology oriented, and
 people who are native English speakers would be the simplistic approach.  They
 would say, well, look, whether we like it or not, English is becoming,
 probably, or not only probably, the most important language in the world.  So
 it's easier for most people to study English and then it will be the easiest
 solution to the problem. The opposite view would be, for example, if local
 politicians, I myself am a politician at the moment, also are non-English
 speakers, would say look, it's true many countries speak different languages,
 but we would like to emphasize our own language to defend our diversity, so we
 would like everybody to use our own language local domain names, local content
 and so on. So it's really difficult to sort out this issue.  If it wasn't so
 difficult, we wouldn't be discussing it so much today and for many years to
 come. So a few thoughts about this. Bulgaria, situated right to the north of
 Greece and expected to become an E.U. member from the first of January next
 years a Slavic country.  Our language belongs to the same language group with
 the Russian language.  We are also a member of the francophonie, but while
 English is now becoming the second most important language in the country. So
 as a policymaker, I would say we will, of course, participate in this global
 debate for the next maybe 100 years. We are very proud of our own alphabet,
 which is the Cyrillic alphabet which is used by probably 200 million -- over
 200 million people in the world. We are also proud of our own language.  We
 have our local content.  But it's also okay for us to study English.  So as a
 ministry, we made the decision this year to train a large number of civil
 servants, 12,000 civil servants from a total number of about 90,000, in English
 and 21,000 people in I.T. this year. Now, these numbers look very large to us. 
 These are only the civil servants I was talking about, not about the whole
 population. Well, next to me is the representative from China, and I have heard
 on television that about 300 million Chinese are studying English at the
 moment.  Also because of the fact that the Olympic games will be held in China,
 and obviously they have to cope somehow with the situation. So maybe the truth
 is somewhere in between.  Maybe the solution for small countries like us is to
 be proud of our own languages, but also to study English and many other
 languages. Now, the second problem, just a very brief remark, local content is
 very important and we are all doing it.  Of course, there are some economies of
 scale in terms of the size of the market. Now, if you are creating local
 content for the UK schools, for example, this content will be able -- will be
 used by the students in the UK, in the U.S., and in many other countries in the
 world. Also, if you are doing something in Mandarin Chinese, then the enormous
 Chinese market is great. Now, yesterday, we had dinner also with the Latvian
 minister of e-government.  She is at the conference.  She might be in this room
 as well.  And their market is about 2 million people, smaller than the
 Bulgarian market, so obviously for them it's more expensive on a per-capita
 basis to develop all the enormous content that's available in the world in
 their own language.  So maybe the solution is they will teach the kids with a
 lot of local content in their own language, but it's very good if some of the
 kids speak other languages -- for example, English, Russian, and so on -- and
 will be able to read the materials in the other languages as well. And the
 third issue, which actually no one, I think, has addressed so far, not at this
 conference and not at other places I have been, is that the problem of the
 so-called transliteration. Now, I am not a scholar.  I am just an economist
 myself, but this should be something like the correct way of spelling certain
 proper names in other languages. Now, we might all think this -- we might take
 this for granted and think this is a very easy issue to solve.  Whoever is an
 English speaker would expect everything to be written with the Latin or Roman
 alphabet, more or less using the 26 English letters, and that's it. But, well,
 the world is more complicated.  So just to explain the issue, I decided to
 divide the languages maybe in several different groups.  Now, what do the
 English and the French and Germans and Spanish do, for example?  The general
 rule is, when spelling proper names, proper names, names of geographical
 locations, for example cities, rivers and so on, and the names of -- proper
 names of people.  So the rule is you spell the name as it is written in the
 original language.  For example, if you open the Financial Times, you will see
 the name of the former Prime Minister Schroder of Germany, for example,
 Chancellor Schroeder, spelled in German.  And if somebody cannot read it very
 properly in German, it's its problem but it is written in German. I think it's
 the same with the French names.  For example, the former president, Francois
 Mitterrand.  Maybe somebody in the U.S. will read it as "Miterand" but that's
 okay, they spell it still in French. Now, there is another group of languages. 
 We are in Greece at the moment.  Now what do we do with the Greek language? 
 Obviously the alphabet is different.  Most people in the world know some of the
 letters in Greek but maybe some know some of the letters in Greek. We in
 neighboring Bulgaria to some extent can know some of the letters but not
 everyone knows all the letters.  So the Greeks historically have sorted out the
 problem.  They have a very good system of transliteration.  If you take the
 name of a Greek person or Greek city, there is almost 100 percent rule how to
 write it with the 26 English letters.  And of course I have seen some mistakes.
 If you drive around the country, occasionally, on rare occasions, you might see
 the same city spelled in two different ways.  Or the name of the same person
 spelled in two different ways.  But this is a small problem because,
 historically, they sorted out this problem. Now, let's take another group of
 languages.  For example, we have people at this panel from Japan and from
 China.  Now, what do they do?  Their problem is even bigger because their
 languages belong to very different language groups from the European languages.
 Now, also, the Japanese language is very different from the Chinese language in
 the following aspect.  To people like us, Japanese sounds quite phonetic,
 quite.  So if you hear a name, even without having been to Japan or without
 speaking Japanese, you will more or less be able to write it down with English
 letters, maybe with some mistakes but maybe not. For example, our moderator,
 Mr. Yoshinori Imai, if you have to spell that name, it will be relatively easy
 for you to do it. Now, for the Chinese, it's, I think -- maybe I am partial
 because I haven't studied Chinese, it's very difficult to write anything
 Chinese. So most people, most of us would have difficulties in pronouncing Mrs
 -- now, let me try, Qiheng Hu?

 >>QIHENG HU:  Right, correct.

 >>CHAIRMAN VASSILEV:  But if she says it, I will not be able to write it down
 myself. Somebody else has to help. Fortunately, the Japanese and the Chinese
 historically have tried to solve this problem, I would say over 90%. The
 Japanese people have no problem writing their name in one unique way, using the
 English alphabet. And the Chinese as well. For example, I've never seen the
 name of the city Shanghai spelled wrongly. It's difficult to spell it, but it's
 always spelled in the same way, because I'm not sure how many years ago, the
 Chinese decided, well, our language is difficult and different, but this is the
 way to transliterate it into the English alphabet. Now comes the last group of
 languages that I wanted to talk about, my -- our language is there, Bulgarian,
 and Russian. We use the Cyrillic alphabet, so we are more or less similar to
 the Greeks. Bulgaria will be a member of the European Union. The Greek language
 was -- the Greek alphabet was the first different alphabet in the E.U., the
 Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet will be the second different alphabet in the E.U.
 next year. Unfortunately, in our country, scholars, I mean, language
 specialists, linguists, politicians, the media people, haven't been able
 historically to sort out this problem. So you can find all kinds of paradoxes.
 For example, starting with my own name, which is a relatively popular Slavic
 name, it can be Russian as well. My first name is Nikolay. You would expect
 this to be very easy to spell it with the Latin alphabet. But it turns out not
 to be so easy, because we've never had universal rules for that. And in the
 first 30 years of my life, I used to spell my first name in four different
 ways, living in different countries. Now, this is not normal. It should not be
 okay. If you take my wife, Sylvia, Sylvia is a relatively easy, internationally
 recognized name. She can show you three consecutive international passports,
 and her first name, Sylvia, is spelled in three different ways. Now, our
 government this year decided to put an end to this problem. And we decided to
 finally create a set of rules, a final and official set of rules that once and
 for all will sort out the problem. We created the table and certain rules that
 will tell you how to write the names of cities, the names of people. So I think
 this issue should not be forgotten when discussing multilingualism on the
 Internet, because for -- what for some nations seems very easy and obvious, for
 other nations is not obvious. Just to finally illustrate the issue, it's been
 very strange to me, I've been to different E.U. conferences in Brussels, for
 example, and there the E.U. people are very kind, they put the name of each
 country spelled in the original language.  For example, for very difficult
 countries to pronounce, they would spelled (saying name) for Hungary in
 Hungarian. We are the only country with a problem, because they tried to spell
 Bulgaria in Latin, and I was very ashamed, because I did not recognize the name
 of our country. It's not the way we would like to see it spelled in English.
 The record holder is a town, a Bulgarian town, called (saying name), a
 difficult name, which if you browse on the Internet, you will see seven
 different ways of spelling this. So to summarize, Mr. Moderator, this is an
 issue which we have to have in mind when going into the future.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Well, I think these linguistic problems should be reflected
 when we talk about multilingualism in the Internet. And, of course, IDNs and so
 forth. And some of our people on the panel are working on that. I will come
 back to those people in this respect. I have so far four questions before me
 from the audience. Could I call each one of you, and would you give the
 panelists and audience your idea, very briefly, because we spent pretty much
 time for the introduction part. First I would like to invite Raul, please.
 Raise your hand, and microphone. Yes, it's coming.

 >>RAUL ECHEBERRIA:  Thank you. Good morning. Well, it's very interesting to
 discuss this question of multilingualism, I've been looking around and I have
 seen that very few people have been wearing headphones, which means that when
 someone speaks something foreign, which isn't English, in other words, they
 have to put their headphones on to understand. So I think we should practice
 multilingualism a little bit more ourselves. Now, obviously, my language is
 Spanish. Spanish is very widely spoken by millions of people throughout the
 world. It's the second most widely spoken language around the world, following
 Chinese. And there are a lot of Spanish-speakers in the United States. Looking
 at Europe and Brazil, there are about 30 million people who are currently
 studying Spanish there. But Spanish on the Internet is very poorly represented.
 The availability and content in different languages and in my language, in this
 case, is very important from various different points of view. People have been
 talking about access, for example.  As we will see this afternoon, this has a
 huge impact on the cost of access to Internet, depending on what language the
 content is printed in. But it's also important in terms of knowledge and
 development. So (saying name) is looking into the economic value of language at
 the current moment. There's a double impact here on development, not only in
 terms of access to knowledge, but also the economic impact of the use of
 language. So I don't know how we can solve this. We've been discussing these
 issues for many years now, and I don't really understand what the role of the
 public authorities and the governments are on this question of content. There's
 a very interesting example from France. French has become the second language
 in terms of content on the Internet. And that is due to the public policies
 introduced by the French government. So my point is, what sort of public
 policies can we implement so that we can promote the use of different
 languages, in this specific case, as we're talking on the Internet. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. Next, Hammam, please. Yes.

 >>HAMMAM RIZA:  Thank you, Mr. Moderator. My name is Hammam Riza, from
 Indonesia. And it is very fortunate for me to probably ask question to the
 panel. So the background is, I came from -- originally, from Aceh, which is the
 tsunami-affected regions in Indonesia, where hundreds of my family disappeared
 during the tsunami. And one phenomena that we observe in Indonesia, there is
 only one protected language, which is the official language, out of 742 native
 languages, local languages, in Indonesia. And the question which is having
 brought forward is, what kind of policy or what should the government do in
 order to preserve these languages, especially for the people that suffer from
 the natural disaster? Because news of the funding of the donor countries
 helping the regions is basically -- doing construction, physical reconstruction
 and rehabilitation, but not in terms of linguistics or social development.
 Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. I would like to remind all the
 panelists and the audience at the same time that this session is about the
 Internet, Internet and language. So linguistic problems should be related to
 this, and this should be referred to as the basic infrastructure of the
 discussion today. But we will not discuss those linguistic questions, language
 problems. But it's in the context of the Internet and the information exchange.
 Well, let me go to Vint Cerf, please.

 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Mr. Moderator. Something that Patrik
 Faltstrom said earlier today triggered a thought. There are people in the world
 who do not have written languages or who are not able to read and write, and
 yet they have equal need for access to information. We also would like to
 preserve on the network their knowledge. I wonder if we could work harder to
 capture oral content on the network and find ways to index it so it could be
 discovered by others who are interested in it. It's a medium which hasn't been
 as fully explored, I think, as it could be. And, by the way, if we learned how
 to do good oral interaction on the network, for people who are blind, this
 would be a great help, because they can't read and write visibly. So just a
 thought for the panel to consider how we can make progress using oral
 interaction and content capture in the context of the Internet.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. The last interjection I would like to
 invite at this time is from H. Shahriari. Where are you? Raise your hand. I
 cannot see. Oh, yeah, to the.

 >>H. SHAHRIARI:  Thank you very much. I think that you can find me as yesterday
 can find my name in automatic writing here. And it is sometimes a problem of
 the name writing, as the chairman, Mr. Chairman, told today. My name is Hamid
 Shahriari, from representative of the delegation of Iran. (Speaking in Persian)
 in Persian and Arabic means "Peace be open him." It's a kind of greeting for
 everybody. Actually, we have 11 million users Internet in Iran now, and we'd
 like to mention that if we want to come to a consensus, first of all, we should
 know each other. And if we want to know each other, there should be some people
 in each culture to know the language of the other culture. If you would like to
 know, you should know the language of that culture. So it's very important for
 us to have the facilities of multilingual culturalism, and multiculturalism.
 And if we want to reach to that aim, it's better for software producing,
 including Microsoft, that support all the languages. Unfortunately, we have
 some exceptions that we cannot have a good communication with such of these
 companies, that we cannot give them information about our languages and they do
 not work hardly on my own languages. So it is good for us. If we want to know
 each other and cooperate with each other and not ban some culture from being
 shared in multilinguistic. We need automatic translation. We need
 transliteration, and we need corpus for all languages to reach to that aim. And
 we'll be happy if we found all cultures to cooperate with each other in this
 aspect. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. SHAHRIARI-San. I think I'm closer than
 before. I will come back to you to get some questions again afterwards. I have
 already a variety of opinions, a variety of approaches, variety of priorities
 among panelists and audience. And I think I have to do two things at least. One
 thing is about I have to spend more time on the local content issue with
 multilingualism. And another issue I think we have to touch upon is IDNs,
 because it's -- some of the participants think it's an urgent problem. And
 there are, I understand, priorities. But first I would like to spend maybe 20
 minutes, 30 minutes on IDN. And then I will go to local content issues with
 languages. In order to make things move faster, I would like to ask all the
 speakers to make speeches very small, condensed, and concise. And I will first
 go to Patrik. I'm sorry, I don't know -- I know you are not very willing to
 talk about this. But in order to make things go faster, will you please give us
 how far we have come in this IDN and what are being tested and what will be the
 future?

 >>PATRIK FALTSTROM:  Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Well, the status of the IDN --
 that's better. The status of the IDN standard is that we have made a decision
 to use the Unicode code set. And that is not something that I see will be
 changed. This implies, of course, that translations from the local character
 set and script that might be used to Unicode create some problems, but to be
 able to use the technical standard, we have to use the Unicode code set.
 Secondly, what has been done is that we do have an encoding of Unicode code set
 in the DNS that works. It is deployed in many countries. IDN is used in many
 countries where the script and where the language, because of that, can handle
 IDNs. But we still do have some scripts and some languages or combination of
 language and scripts where the current standard of IDN is not 100% perfect. And
 we have some issues with the right-to-left scripts. We do have some issues with
 some other -- with, for example, the Hebrew script, they have some certain
 details that I don't have to go into here. But, at the moment, we are doing a
 revised version of the IDN version where we do more careful selection of the
 code points, what characters you can use. We are -- I know that ICANN is
 working very hard. They have a test at the moment going on on how IDN will work
 in the root zone file so we can get top-level domains that are
 internationalized. And I think we are very close to be able to have a result of
 that technical discussion. There are still many policy decisions that have to
 be made regarding internationalized versions of domain names, including tractor
 issues that need to be discussed. But I claim that regarding the technical
 implementation for the World Wide Web, we are done except for maybe some corner
 cases. Microsoft really is Internet Explorer, seven the other week. And that,
 to me, means that all the major browsers used on all operating systems on the
 major operating systems, the Mac, Linux, Windows, do support IDNs in the
 browser. So that is already deployed. That is already working. So -- but -- so
 the only thing that is happening are these, like, sort of problems that,
 unfortunately, are very, very difficult problems for some very large groups.
 And I encourage people that know that they have problems in their local script
 to contact me and to participate in the IETF process where we are hammering out
 those small, last, very few issues. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Alex, do you have something to say about this IDN?

 >>ALEX CORENTHIN:  I think that what Patrik has just said pretty much reflects
 the path that's been followed. We are trying in Africa to contribute to
 launching an initiative called the Africa Ideal. And that will allow us, with
 the African Academy for Languages, whose President is with us here today, Mr. 
 Samassekou, it will allow us with linguists to see what is linked to
 transcription of our various different languages and those which have already
 been taken care of in Unicode. So there is a lot of work still to do, because
 we have to go beyond the classical taps that exist this far. So in the major
 discussion groups, this is becoming an important issue now. But we don't have a
 critical mass of competence as yet. There are some -- there is a need to
 develop competence and ability in these countries, which will allow us then to
 move faster ahead in deployment of this technology and boost the languages. It
 is, though, a very important issue, because the linguistic and cultural
 features are expressed through certain very clear expressions. This could be a
 way of increasing content, because it will be pushing us towards Internet
 technology.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Divina.

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  (No translation). Should I speak in English?

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Is the translation working?

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  I can also speak in Catalan.

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:

 >>:Can you hear the English interpretation now? You can hear it now?

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  From the point of view of the researchers, of course, we
 have followed ICANN's work very closely, and we welcome it from the point of
 view of internationalization. But each time that new difficulties emerge, we
 start moving towards very heavy, cumbersome solutions, with lists of
 characters, more than 50 elements, which are not very easy for the users. On
 the research side, we realize that there's a kind of linguistic bias in certain
 areas. Look back to what was said yesterday with John. That showed that --
 well, there are three types of bias there:  Preexisting ones due to the fact
 that the Internet was developed by millions of English-speaking researchers and
 that English is far and away the dominant language. And there is a technical
 bias with the ASCII and the Punycode being selected to try to solve these
 international problems. But that gives problems for languages with very long
 nouns which are amputated, if you like, from the word go. And then there are
 other emerging biases, as, for example, this question of ownership and the
 proprietary nature of certain names and how ICANN swings in with this. We have
 got problems which go beyond purely technological ones, there are human ones as
 well. And they have to be taken on board. We would be all four systems, which
 would allow nouns being expressed as key words in the native language, because
 that would allow us to shorten things, it would allow for economies of scale.
 And in research, we could use very widely spread apparatus, the telephone, for
 example, for this, which would be very useful for developing countries, Africa
 in particular, where there are largely oral languages and cultures, and it
 would take a long time to transcribe -- to transliterate those in writing. Now,
 we could translate the key words. We wouldn't need a full translation, just
 vocal recognition of words. This comes back to the problem of the oral nature
 which was raised beforehand. And, well, it would involve other minorities that
 we don't say an awful lot about. But they are part and parcel of our diversity.
 And that's minorities of people with a handicap. So it would open up the
 possibility of expanding language semantics and interpretation and would allow
 research through the semantic Web, et cetera. I think that that would have
 repercussions for teaching as well. It would enrich, it would ask -- make us
 have targeted searching, with intuitive words used for users, obviously, having
 to go through search engines now. It doesn't necessarily give us an awful lot
 of information. Look at media pro, which you will find on the Web,
 mediapro.org. Certain people use Google, up to 90%, to look for their favorite
 sites, not to get the information. So there is a lack of competence and info
 competence in terms of what is already on the Internet, the wealth of what is
 already there. Because people can't target it in their own native language. And
 that applies, in particular, to young people and their access to culture.
 Obviously, there's the local economic question as well for non-majority
 languages, one of the problems for local languages is that developing content
 over time is very difficult. And if it can be done through these languages, it
 would be great. So some of us have already discussed this. We've been talking
 about tabling a proposal on the progressive implementation of a domain name
 system with added value. But to achieve that, the multistakeholder community
 would have to kick in. We'd need a multiplayer working group to look into this,
 which would be under the aegis of a nongovernmental organization already
 working alongside the civil society, you'd have the states there and the
 private sector. We could be talking, for example, about UNESCO, just looking
 down the line here, or the ITU. And that working group should look into this
 emerging issue that we've recognized today, the emerging issue of cultural
 diversity, alongside the new tools, what ICANN has developed on the one hand,
 and on the other, tools such as the semantic Web and the different types of
 language, et cetera. I think it's absolutely essential that we should all leave
 from here saying that something will be prepared for Rio. I don't know whether
 that's everyone's opinion here. We've been saying that, you know, it's a bit
 difficult to look forward to the future. But I would hope that by Rio, this
 working group could produce a negotiated report which would reflect the state
 of play, what's happening with the various different options, which would allow
 us to think about having an ongoing situation with the Web as it is now, but
 being aware of the fact that there are new options which need to be taken on
 board as well. I'm nearly finished, I promise you. But it should take a look at
 the state of the art, and also come up with some suggestions, some
 recommendations which could then be discussed in Rio.  Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. I am very polite Japanese but I again have to ask
 you to limit your statement within a minute, please. And before going back to
 them, would I like to invite one question from the floor. Pavan Duggal, I would
 like to have your intervention or discussion, please.

 >>PAVAN DUGGAL:  Good morning, I am Pavan Duggal, I am the president of cyber
 law Asia and also the president of cyber law India.  We have been working a lot
 on the legal issues concerning Internationalized Domain Names, and I had a
 question for the panel, and I thought I'd like it take the perspectives. We had
 a fantastic session yesterday where the effort was primarily aimed at ensuring
 that there should not be any fragmented Internet.  And while we are working
 towards a globalized, multilingual Internet, the important issue is is how do
 we tackle the crucial and very critical argument concerning sovereignty.  It's
 good to say that Internet model as it happened today will be equally replicated
 in the context of the multilingual domains.  What is of crucial significance is
 do we as IGF have a legal strategy as to how do we counter the argument of
 sovereignty, of sovereign nations.  And also the argument that nations
 themselves are the legitimate heirs and have legitimate claims to linguistic
 distinctiveness as also linguistic heritage.  These are crucial areas, and I
 believe these are areas that will act as black holes as far as Internet law and
 policy are concerned. So the crucial issue is, do we have any strategies ahead?
  And if at all, can we evolve a more inclusive process?  And another thing,
 does technology allow us to bypass the sovereignty argument?  These are some of
 the very complicated issues that I thought I would like to flag along and get
 this distinguished panel to respond to these issues. Thank you, sir.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Kieren, I understand there is an injection from outside the
 hall, a short message.  Before that, I would like to go to Madam Hu.

 >>QIHENG HU:  I would like to point out that concern in the exchange of
 different cultures and nationalities vis-a-vis the need to keep cultural
 heritage.  Just now it was mentioned that 300 million Chinese were learning
 English.  That is true.  That is for the purpose of facilitating communicating
 with the rest of the world.  And my government has been working hard on this. 
 But I have tried to use Latin phonetic system to spell Chinese. This has
 brought us a lot of advantages.  For instance, the world Shanghai is a name
 which is easy to write and no one can make mistake.  But our past experience
 has shown that Chinese still are not very comfortable with using Latin letters
 to spell Chinese.  They still prefer what is not easy to understand for most of
 you here, the idiograms.  Because of that, I think IDN is something we need
 very much.  It is especially helpful for those people who are not very well
 educated because they prefer to use the language they are familiar with to
 express themselves, and find this way of doing things most convenient. We
 cannot avoid this issue, of course.  That is not a mean to facilitate the
 multilingualism and the multiculturism of the Internet.  It cannot solve all
 the problem, that's for sure. Just now it was pointed out by some person that
 there should be automatic translation much that is, indeed, very important. 
 However, IDN is just one step in the process. I believe that as far as a
 national sovereignty is concerned in the process IDN, actually at the stage of
 WSIS, we have come to a very good consensus that a ccTLD should be part of the
 national sovereignty. As for the ccTLD, met with local countants and local
 languages, perhaps in these policy studies, ICANN should address this matter as
 a priority issue as it poses least problems and challenges and should be dealt
 with first. This, I believe, will facilitate our process to globalize IDN. 
 Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. We have some message coming in from
 outside the call.  Kieren, please.

 >>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Yes, there is quite a big discussion going on in the chat
 rooms and also we have text messages coming in and e-mails coming in.  Can the
 panelists give some cases if there are any initiatives to help improve the
 development of content, whether through the government or private sector. 
 Presumably multilingual content.  Michael Nelson says a lot of this discussion
 is ignoring VOIP, which is where Internet users have been communicating a lot
 more in developing countries recently, so can we talk about Skype, Vonage,
 those sorts of issues. RAM Mohan says IDNs themselves are only a small aspect
 of achieving diversity.  And also there is the concern that Allison W. says in
 the chat room there are two users on the Internet, one is the reader, the other
 is the provider.  And the middle person must not be a search engine or
 transliteration engine that isn't consistent or lack of character availability
 on a keyboard.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much.  Before going back to the panel, I
 invite two questions that I have already received.  David Wood, yeah, the
 gentleman here.  And I will go to Japanese participant Tsukasa Makino
 afterwards. Will you please be brief.

 >>DAVID WOOD:  Yes, actually, I think you almost answered the questions. I
 wondered if Mr. Faltstrom could actually, though, for the record and for our
 people inside the space give us a timetable for the completion of IDN.  And
 just tell us who is doing what and what he sees as the main barriers to its
 completion. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you.  Tsukasa Makino.

 >>TSUKASA MAKINO:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  My name is Tsukasa Makino from
 Japan, Tokyo and the (saying name) Insurance Company.  I am here for (saying
 name). And my question is would we really need to rely on domain name to
 retrieve information?  For example, I merely type domain name to my computer,
 listen to it.  I use Google and it work quite well.  So using current
 technology, like voice recognition, automatic translation, and powerful search
 engine, I can retrieve information such as find me a fine Greek restaurant
 around the (saying name) hotel. So in this way, people can retrieve information
 with their own language without even typing, touching a keyboard. So my
 question is, is that worth for effort to create a multilingual domain name? 
 That's my question.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much.  I think the question again is if
 domain names are identifier or identity.  I think that we go back to Patrik.

 >>PATRIK FALTSTROM:  Thank you, I will try to be very quick here.  First I
 would like to answer some questions that came up here.  First a question about
 encoding and the favoring of some scripts and languages.  It's actually the
 case, I just want to make it clear to everyone, the Punycode encoding of
 Unicode character sets in IDN is not favorizing any language whatsoever; okay?
 It is the case that the coding -- we came up with exactly be a brand-new
 encoding just because any label that is written in one and only one script will
 be equally compressed compared to, for example, UTF8.  This may sound a little
 bit technical but it's important to know.  IDN compared to other versions are
 handle Unicode, no language is favorized. We do have a problem in DNS on long
 words, though, which is a different problem that was pointed out, but that is
 not something we can do.  That's a technical limitation in the DNS system.
 Regarding key word systems, yes, I'm one of the persons, together with John
 Klensin that is a co-editor of the IDN documents.  We have tried to deploy key
 word systems since 1995, apparently written many systems.  There have so far
 not been any interest in that, but I really, really hope that will happen.  We
 have several RFCs in the IETF that point out the importance of key word
 systems, because IDNs are still identifiers.  If people want to use words, you
 need key word systems.  Regarding using key word systems, there are, especially
 for illiterate people and for language regions where you don't have a written
 language, there are several research projects going on, one run by packet
 clearinghouse, and Bill Woodcock, he will be on the access panel this
 afternoon, but he is around here so you can talk to him, that try to help
 people in African countries with the help of phones to navigate the Internet.
 Also, the biggest users of cell phones in Sweden are people who are deaf.  They
 use sign language on cell phones.  And the problem the Swedish government have
 is they cannot call the emergency phone center, 112 or 911, yet.  So they are
 trying to some of that problem. Then I have a question about timetable for
 completion.  The timetable is actually pretty short.  We have the first draft
 of the new version of the IDN standard.  We have to, within the next two
 months, make a decision whether the classification of code points in the
 Unicode character set is good enough when we are selecting what code points to
 use or not. So we need to have people in this room in the world look at the
 proposed -- the proposed papers in the IETF and say whether the Unicode tables
 are good or not. If it is the case that the classification is not good enough,
 then we have to go back to the Unicode consortium and also for a new
 classification of code points. So the first -- the first very important date I
 would say is before the end of this year.  We don't have time to have too many
 meetings and nice lunches. And then last thing, what can governments and public
 and private sector do.  And I would say be a good procurer.  Make sure that the
 content management system that you buy and use can use multiple languages.  If
 you use open source, participate, make sure that the system is possible to
 handle multiple languages.  That is not the case in many cases. I don't know
 how many systems that I use myself personally where I have personally had to
 write -- rewrite part of the program to handle just Swedish and English, which
 doesn't even encounter left-to-right scripts.  Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much.  As I promised earlier, we have spent
 some 30 minutes on this issue, and if anything left by now, I will try to go
 back Towards the end of the session.

 >>KEISUKE KAMIMURA:  Excuse me, may I jump in?  I quite agree with Tsukasa
 Makino from Japan when he said we don't quite use names, per se, let alone
 Internationalized Domain Name, and let me introduce some of my experience in
 Japan with regard to domain names, or Internationalized Domain Names. As people
 have mentioned, IDN is becoming in more news these days, but people are
 beginning to realize more on search engines.  So until a couple of years ago,
 you heard URLs read out in television on radio programs in Japan.  But now
 that's different.  You will hear search strings instead of URLs. So the program
 will say -- will not say go to this URL.  Instead, they will say search this
 search string with Google or Yahoo! or whatever search engine you like. So we
 are gradually doing away with URLs or domain names altogether, whether
 internationalized or un-internationalized.  But this issue, to me, to my
 observation, will raise another issue of concern, which is the governance of
 search engines, because if we begin to rely more on search engines, search
 engines are expected to be more open and transparent. So we can -- we have two
 choices.  So keep going with Internationalized Domain Names, and the other
 option is go with search engines.  But both directions will raise an issue that
 we have not seen before.  Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. Three more hands raised.  Would you
 please be brief.

 >>ADAMA SAMASSEKOU:  I will be brief.  I basically just wanted to agree with
 the idea of setting up a working group.  I made this professional in the UNESCO
 workshop yesterday.  And with our debate here, I see that we have a very
 complex issue we need to face.  It's a sensitive and difficult one at that. 
 And I do think the World Summit spirit here is to have this multistakeholder
 interest expressed on a very difficult issue.  To be able to speak, discuss,
 and put issues on the table and come to some sort of consensus.  I think it's
 very important.  It's fundamental that we should reinforce that, and I'm very
 happy to see that the forum, through the Internet, can set a very good example,
 an excellent example of how we can, in fact, undertake such processes. I
 congratulate the organizers of the forum for having maintained that spirit. So
 I really must insist here on not today creating any sort of tension on this
 issue.  We have to open up the debate.  We do have experience over many years
 of ICANN on this, and we put this on the table through the working group. 
 There are many new ideas that are being evoked here.  And I think that
 technology does enable us to confront all of these issues and to say that we
 must here deal with languages and cultures. I think that the question of
 identity, therefore, is fundamental, and we have already said that sovereignty
 is important.  But we need to go beyond that and put things on the table and
 not try to in any way raise any sort of specters in terms of security.  We have
 to be very open on this.  So that's it.  A working group to see how we can
 continue on this.  Thank you very much.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much.  Andrzej, please.  Just very brief.

 >>ANDRZEJ BARTOSIEWICZ:  When you are talking about IDNs, I think that it's not
 enough to have the standards, because we had most of the standards already done
 three years ago.  And it's important to have all the stakeholders to be
 involved. And therefore, I think that it's important also such bodies like ITU,
 which actually I am dealing with the IDNs within ITU, but also UNESCO and
 others to participate in facilitating.  It's not enough that there are some
 countries, especially well developed, which have the Internationalized Domain
 Names implemented.  It's important to have those that have not enough knowledge
 so far.  And we have to help them and bring them some information that they can
 use. It's also -- It has been also mentioned this national sovereignty.  And
 actually, I was a little bit surprised with Patrik talking about the policy and
 the need to follow the policy, because from my perspective, it's important that
 local Internet communities are implementing and deploying the policies.  It's
 important for IETF, ICANN to create technical background, and it's up to the
 nations, up to the people to implement the IDNs in the way they think it's
 important. I know that most of the technical standardization has been already
 done, but I think it's important to mention in this forum that we still do not
 have IDN.IDN solutions.  From my perspective, the personal perspective from
 Poland, it doesn't matter because .PL, it is already internationalized, but
 those who are using the Arabic or Cyrillic script, Chinese, Japanese, et
 cetera, not the Latin based, I think it's time for them to type WWW, in Arabic
 let's say dot the Arabic domain name and dot the ccTLD in Arabic. And I agree
 with our Chinese representative that it's important, the ccTLD part.  It's the
 most important in case of multilingual Internet. That's generally my comments.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. Let me give the microphone to Elizabeth and let's
 move to the second part of the....

 >>ELIZABETH LONGWORTH:  Yes, thank you.  I have some brief comments on IDN but
 they apply equally to other aspects of this topic. The first is that before
 IDN, there's a step before that in terms of negotiating within a language
 community and agreeing on the way in which your script or language will be
 represented digitally.  So negotiating the character sets is critically
 important and I think there are some things that can be done at the local
 level.  We need to think in terms of language communities because language
 transcends national boundaries.  But there are a lot of specifics that can be
 done around developing the glossaries and working with another language to put
 it into a form where the people themselves are then comfortable about it being
 submitted to the standards process. The second point concerns a point that was
 raised on sovereignty.  I am actually a lawyer by training and I believe law is
 just a construct.  And if we are going to talk about the Internet as a global
 public goods, then it becomes counterproductive to focus purely on sovereignty
 issues.  Instead, I would suggest that if we are going to stay with the analogy
 of global public goods, then perhaps we should think about identifiers as a
 tool, as a technique in which we all have a public interest and an
 international public interest rather than being the expression of the native or
 natural language. There's a transliteration process that has to happen from the
 language into the digital form.  And we need tools and techniques to do that.
 And if we focus only on the sovereignty, we get very distracted. I'd suggest
 it's more important to talk about the skills and the capacities that are needed
 for ordinary people to engage in developing agreed language sets and then to
 actually participate so they become content creators. When you get to the
 questions on policy, Mr. Moderator Yoshi, I have specifics to offer the
 questioner.  And can I finally say, we must be careful here not to reinvent
 what's already been done.  We should be building on what has been done. Going
 into the world summit, for example, there was a thematic meeting on just this
 topic.  It was called multilingualism for cultural diversity and participation
 of all in cyberspace.  A big long topic but it's the same as discussed today. 
 It was hosted by the government of Mali, it was a global meeting, and in that
 report it has specifics and recommendations, collective thinking of global
 experts who came together to address this on policy, standards, technical
 solutions, monitoring, content development, international collaboration, and
 recommendations. And I would urge that we build off this work that's been done.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Yeah, I recognize two more hands raised, but let me give you
 time towards the end of the session on IDN.  Again, I try to do that. Let me
 move to content issue. As I stressed at the beginning of the session, a
 development, inclusiveness of the Internet I think is very important.  In terms
 of country, in terms of communities, in terms of presence. There are questions
 coming up from the floor.  May I go to one of them, Sylvia Caras.  Will you
 raise your hand, please?  And then second I will call on John Fung, and the
 third person I will call on is Saida Agrebi.  Please be ready for the
 microphone.

 >>SYLVIA CARAS:  Thank you. I'm Sylvia Caras. I'm the ICT link for the
 International Disability Alliance, which is eight global organizations. I
 appreciate the panelists who have mentioned disability. But some 17% of people
 have a disability, and I've only seen here one man with a wheelchair and one
 woman with a cane. The deaf have a culture. Signing is a language. Most Web
 sites are inaccessible to text readers used by those with reading-related
 disabilities, people with learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities, people
 who are blind. Disability cross-cuts the themes of this forum, but many people
 with disabilities are not part of the information society. How can people with
 disabilities become included stakeholders in this development process?

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. Then John. John Fung. Can we see the
 hands for a microphone. Now, then, let me go to SAIDA.

 >>SAIDA AGREBI:  Well, I have a question -- for we are in favor of cultural
 diversity of course. But we know what we need to do to guarantee it. We have to
 eradicate illiteracy.

 >> Translation is coming through perfectly. Please go ahead in Arabic.

 >>SAIDA AGREBI:  We would like to raise the issue here of eradicating
 illiteracy. And see if we can also do it digitally. Perhaps what I'll say now
 will not be understood by the interpreters, but all I can say is that during
 the summit in Tunis, we used the conclusions we came to to organize today's --
 well, this week's meeting, and everybody agreed that linguistic diversity is
 very important. We need, for example, a dictionary for technical terms and
 international terms which are not translated from English into other languages.
 I will ask the -- I will make this request to the UNESCO and to all other
 institutions here, because we have to allow, for example, all those who are
 marginalized, women, people with special needs, to have access and be able to
 participate in lifelong learning through the Internet.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Well, when we talk about local contents, I think all the
 issues on top of linguistic issues are coming up, like the disability,
 illiteracy. All of those questions, I think, should be discussed together here.
 May I go to Julian. How are you coping with those local content issues in your
 community in Colombia?

 >>JULIAN CASASBUENAS:  The experience we have gained, well, is relatively
 little. But what we do know is that our government's earmarked limited
 resources to this area. So perhaps the first request should be towards
 governments, so that they do dedicate more technical and financial resources to
 these groups to inform marginal groups and make the online content available to
 them. Technical problems are not so tough. You have many opportunities to
 publish information using many formats. The panel has already mentioned the
 audiovisual possibilities and tools which are being designed. But what we see
 at the local level is that we need resources which will guarantee and
 facilitate local content generation. We have to be more online locally. I think
 free software in local languages will allow us to process information more
 efficiently and more simply. So I think that's the direction we should be
 taking. We need to invest more effort, because we support base organizations.
 So perhaps that's what the future ahead should be like.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Nurul.

 >>NURUL KABIR:  Thank you. My point is for the local content discussions. I
 have a few issues. Before I start that, I would like to go back to see the
 declaration and the commitment from Geneva phase and Tunis phase, what was
 there. Actually, the policies here are very important in the national level
 where it mentioned here that create policies that support -- respect the
 prevention, promotion, and enhancement of cultural and linguistic diversity and
 cultural heritage within the information society. At the same time, it was also
 mentioned that develop national policy and laws to ensure the cultural and
 linguistic diversities issues. My point is here that at this point, when we are
 talking about the linguistic issues and diversity issues, are we taking any
 stock, sort of stock-taking process? What are the situations in the different
 countries, like our country, like developing countries, which is 140 million
 peoples, a huge population in a small country. But literacy rate is not that
 high. And Internet user is not that high as well. But if we look into the --
 building information society, when language is, of course, a very big issue,
 and content development, where I like to emphasize other aspect, the market
 access and market opportunity using local language. You see, there are huge
 opportunity in the market. If we like to ignore that, we will miss the
 opportunity. And what we call the bottom -- unfortunately, the bottom of the
 pyramid. So if I can bring you an example like in India, there is a project
 that developed that (inaudible), many of you know that, strengthening the
 supply chain management system of the Indian tobacco company. But, eventually,
 it became a very good example that how to reduce the middleman to give more
 benefit to the farmers. So it reached the end suppliers or the farmers, those
 who are underprivileged, but they are the main producers. So, to reach them in
 the market information and opportunities, we have to build some local content
 to provide them information. And also, I can see the opportunity here, when
 many of the countries in the electronic government development of software is
 in -- local language is needed, because they are government procedures, and
 communications is in the local language. How we are actually building those
 contents and also the elearning issues. Here, I appreciate about the digital
 audiovisual contents, where many of the countries, developing countries, those
 literacy rate is not that high, they cannot directly access, but this content
 can support to increase the opportunities for the society. And there is a
 movement I have seen -- if I see that information society point of view, the
 telecenter or information center, many of the organizations are developing
 these in the different countries. In our country, there are 68,000 villages,
 and there is an objective for many organizations to develop a telecenter or
 information center or knowledge center in each village. There are a number of
 pilot projects going there. My point is, the telecenter or knowledge center
 doesn't mean that we will put some computer over there. We have to provide some
 content in a useful manner and also involve people to access the information
 and also give the market opportunities in the global society, in the global
 business places, where opportunity is globally available in Internet and where 
 eCommerce is in place, how we will actually instigate those. That is my point.
 And if we do not address those, we lose a lot of opportunities in the future.
 And here, actually, public-private partnership is very, very important, where
 private sector can play a vital role in multistakeholder partnership process.
 At this point, thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Elizabeth.

 >>ELIZABETH LONGWORTH:  Let me try and answer this one, and also at the same
 time, answer the question that was on policy, what can governments do. On local
 content, you're working at the policy level, but you're also working at the
 local level in terms of skills, building the skills and the capacities. And we
 know that there's a huge incentive to encourage people to become content
 creators in their own right, because it's a real sense of self-respect and the
 expression of who you are. It's how you foster sort of a democratic and a more
 participatory environment in your local community. Several points. One is the
 policy on mother tongue in schools and the incentive this can get and the
 economic and social development improvements if the children can access the
 mother tongue in their schools. Second is the point that was raised about
 making official information available in the local language, both at the local
 governmental information, and national governmental information. This is
 absolutely crucial for viable participatory democracy. I don't mean that in the
 political sense, but just having people having control over their lives. Next
 point is community media. Governments can help with their licensing policies
 not being threatened by the idea of community media. We have at UNESCO a
 program on community multimedia centers that put together radio and oral
 traditions and Internet. And another point which I alluded to before is finding
 local facilitators in an area who can work with the community, and you can use
 conventional outlets like radio, conventional conduits, to get ideas, to build
 your glossaries and your dictionaries and to ensure that your language is being
 recorded using your own narrative structures. And you have to find the local
 champions to then help prepare the local community to have their language
 represented. Another point is on oral traditions. There are different angles
 here. There's the inclusiveness angle in terms of people such as visually
 impaired. But also, I come from a region where the oral tradition is very
 strong. And there are many languages that are not yet in written form. We at
 UNESCO worked on a project with other collaborators on the N'Ko project in
 Africa to help that language become capable of having a digital representation.
 We have another project with the library of Alexandria and the software that
 they used to facilitate the visually impaired and those working with oral
 information to access it. Next point, on content creation, is the huge emphasis
 on skills development. It's a big incentive to become up-skilled if you know
 that you're able to not only access the information you need, but you can
 produce information about your own community that's relevant and you can share
 information about your own needs. And, finally, look at the policies around
 alternative communication channels. And if it's not available in the
 conventional area with community channels and non-mainstream channels, then
 that's the beauty of the Internet and the blogosphere, assuming one can access
 the Internet with the bandwidth, of course, which is another problem for this
 afternoon.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Some natural questions that came to me, one of them is that
 how you can strengthen development tools in individual countries, and also how
 -- how you can support scripts and languages that might not be commercially
 viable. Please think of those questions. And then meanwhile, I will go to
 Divina. Will you be a little short? And then --

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  Well, I'll try and be brief. As far as content is
 concerned, what we should be looking for is content transfer. And this is often
 mentioned. Media-to-media content is an interesting idea. And the Internet does
 give this opportunity. So this should be maintained. And for country-to-country
 transfer, sometimes we know that languages find it easier to cross borders,
 although we do have the unfortunate experience and examples of countries which
 block neighboring languages at the border. We have the positive example of
 Spain and South America. But mention has been made in that case of colonialism.
 So let's not forget that there are shades for every argument. Now, as far as
 education is concerned, and degrees and online degrees, there's a partnership,
 for example, between China and the U.S.  China is very passive as a partner in
 this partnership. All they do is translate the MIT courses. I think that if you
 have such a kind of partnership, you should be more active and invent new
 strategies, switching, which means adapting your content to your real needs.
 Our objective should be human resources, so in switching, who would be the main
 player. We see this in the sphere of education. We have local tutors, people
 who learn online. They take the content from English-speaking countries, for
 example, or English-speaking content, and they use that in their own language
 to train their own students. But in that case, you have to have linguistic,
 cultural, scientific knowledge. And in certain cases, these people don't have
 the skills. They are badly paid. So as I said, human resources should be at our
 focus. Sometimes we have imported software and local users and the opportunity
 is given to remodel this software and tailor it to local needs. So we need
 switching and private-public civic partnership.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you.

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  I would like this three-prong approach to be supported.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Madam Hu, please.

 >>QIHENG HU:  I will be brief. Regarding the content in local language, China
 has many, many projects, like the projects for library, cultural resources, and
 heritages for minorities, the singing and dancing heritage. These are being
 transferred, represented in digital forms. Here, I wish to mention three
 points. Firstly, it is necessary, as far as China is concerned, at least, to
 increase the sharing -- or, rather, increase the awareness and capability on
 our part for exchanges with other countries, other cultures. This is a
 consensus for building the information society. So we need to raise the
 awareness the industry got. Secondly, in the course of exchange of online
 resources, there is problem of fee payment or royalties. This has become a
 major issue in our process of sharing with the developed countries. The payment
 is usually a one-way affairs. This is a well-known issue. In order to enrich
 the cultural sources online, to promote the diversity and sharing, the payment
 for royalties should be solved in a just manner. Thirdly, the I.P. protection
 -- or intellectual property protection on the Internet, we now have worldwide
 library, thesaurus, gallery, et cetera. In order to participate in those
 projects, we need to have good laws and international understanding so as to
 protect the rights of intellectual properties and cultural resources. These are
 important issues. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  (inaudible).

 >>ADAMA SAMASSEKOU:  I think the discussion hasn't really taken into account
 the main issue, which is local content. What we see is that the main point is
 switching or transferring. We are creating a new society, and the ICT world
 should give opportunities to those involved in their own language. The question
 is not if we're able to use a language or a different language or a third
 language in order to make my local content known. That is already dealt with.
 What does local content mean? What does an international content mean? It means
 that in certain countries, they have translated international content into
 their local language. But is that local content? I think we should reexamine
 the foundations of this new society, because if we're not -- if we're not
 careful, we will base ICT on the inequalities we have in the third world. I
 will give you an example of our continent, our countries. We were all
 colonized, and for black Africa, it's still an aberration to find that in most
 of our states the languages people are familiar with are not the languages used
 by the administration. It's something, perhaps, you don't know so much in
 Europe, but what would happen in Greece if you sent Greek kids to school and
 they started their training in Japanese?  That would be problematic for you. So
 what we need is to have policy, the right kind of policies in each state, and
 that's why we are cooperating with UNESCO and with other institutions.  The
 African academy of languages is trying to emancipate African languages, because
 digital technology should be an opportunity for us to hasten our development
 process for African languages, we have the resolution from the summit of the
 African summit in Khartoum, and we thought we should hold a meeting to take
 stock of all questions linked to the use of our languages in cyberspace. And
 this meeting perhaps will be the one in Cairo in 2007 where linguists will meet
 technological experts and solutions will be offered. So what we need is for
 Africans to be able to conceive and produce content in their languages, but
 also through interpreting and translation view content produced elsewhere.
 Because that would mean really a participatory society.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Let me go to Riyadh with some questions about content.  One
 is about Arabic content.  Could you tell me about that, and the other is we
 both work in the broadcasting industry.  And what do broadcasters all over the
 world, in individual countries and communities, can do to help make local
 content available in the Internet?

 >>RIYADH NAJM:  Thank you. Let me tackle the first point. As far as Arabic
 content is concerned, we are part of the Arab states broadcasting union who is
 -- who has the memberships of all or most broadcasters in the Arab world.  And
 there are some initiatives that are being taken care of to increase or enhance
 the local content creation, that on the individual's part, not in the tech's
 part. But really here I think the general issue here is the local content as
 far as the Internet is concerned.  We are not talking here about local content
 in all other medias or different medias.  And this is where we should
 concentrate about. Actually, for developing countries, the Internet is actually
 sometimes a blessing, whereby you can produce and have your content available
 to the rest of the world with a relatively cheap way of doing that. If you were
 to go on other different media, you would need to invest a lot more resources,
 financial and in terms of personal capacity building. So this is what is being
 done. And for broadcasters in general, we probably need to encourage them to
 put the audiovisual content on the Internet for that simple reason that it is
 relatively easy to do that, and also because it is not language specific or
 sensitive.  Audiovisual can be put on the same form that it was created, and it
 does not need to be translated for that particular language, of course. And
 then it can be accessed to, whether it being from the local community or from
 the international community that can speak that language. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  I am going to take some questions from the audience, but
 before that, I will like to remind you that I posed a question, two questions. 
 One is how you can develop tools for development of local contents, making
 local contents.  How you can develop human resources in that.  If you have any
 concrete ideas, proposals, please come up with that. And also are another point
 is what I found, talking with many people here, is that very often, the
 software is expensive in the countries where the market is very small.  A small
 number of people are speaking relatively limited languages, which you cannot
 use anywhere else. So will you please give me some idea about how you can do
 that software development by the commercial vendors in the rest of the world,
 who control the world in terms of software. Let me go to the audience. I have
 several questions. One thing is about standards elaboration -- I mean language
 diversity and standards. Lamia Chaffai.  Are you here. Were he, please.  No? 
 You cannot find? Okay.  I go to next person.  Izumi Aizu about international
 standards.

 >>IZUMI AIZU:  It relates to what earlier Patrik said that we need the tools
 and also what Mr. (saying name) said about the software development.  The basis
 of the software for the languages, especially for the minority -- I wouldn't
 say minority but certain languages with very small population uses, it is very
 difficult to first come to the Unicode standardization.  Perhaps that's the
 first entry.  After, the standardization process goes ahead of those people or
 native people could participate. A typical case is post conflict countries,
 such as Cambodia, or now we are facing (saying name), but it is very difficult
 to get any recognition from the donors, development community, not to list the
 commercial vendors.  And of course the open source environment is perhaps a
 good solution. But again, the resources are very limited.  So they couldn't
 necessarily participate to generating the content level.  As well as the
 applications.  Even you have the operating standard, you need operating system,
 you need the word processing software or the other content creations in their
 local languages. So these are the areas. They have some governance problems
 that the usually it is, I will bluntly say, dominated by the north.  And there
 are not much outreach activities.  They say yes, the door is open.  You can
 participate if they have the means to.  And going to the IETF or W3C or Unicode
 consortium, these areas, very expensive and often you don't find the people who
 are equipped with these skills being necessary the local or native people. So
 how do you tackle these areas is my question and comment.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Is there any proposal on your side?

 >>IZUMI AIZU:  Yeah, I think one is those other international standardization
 bodies involved in wherever it is should make very extra effort to support the
 inclusion, participation of those underprivileged or marginalized people, which
 was included in the Dot Force action plan in 2002.  We are part of that, at
 Code Five but we have not really seen the implementation by international
 community.  There was a very specific proposal but not really undertaken
 seriously.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. I will have three or four more injections. May I
 go to Patrice.  Yes, in the back.

 >>PATRICE LYONS:  Yes, thank you, Mr. Moderator.  Patrice Lyons, Washington,
 D.C. In the Internet environment, especially when talking about creating local
 content, there are new languages of expression.  And here I'm thinking of
 languages like C++, Java, and python.  I'm most familiar with python because
 the young gentleman that started it came from the Netherlands and he started
 python as a children's language.  I think it was called ABC. So there are two
 aspects that perhaps I could suggest is that consideration for education for
 children in multiple programming languages, or at least one particular
 language, and also it's my understanding that interpreters are required.  That
 translation among the languages is possible, but it becomes very difficult if
 you don't have adequate interpreters. So the new programming language is not
 just the traditional languages, should be taken up, I think, in this context. 
 Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. Let me go to Raphael Canet about the
 market mechanism. Yes, please.

 >>RAPHAEL CANET:  Thank you.  My name is Raphael Canet from the University of
 Quebec in Montreal.  I will speak in French. I'd like to come back to this
 question of means at our disposal to respect cultural linguistic diversity,
 particularly related to the market. UNESCO has adopted a convention on the
 protection of cultural diversity, or the use of cultural expressions.  And that
 talks about the introduction of public policies and agreements as well. Various
 countries haven't signed this convention.  Israel and the United States.  And
 the United States is currently signing bilateral agreements which may affect
 the cultural area.  We saw this recently in the case of European cinema. So
 what we are seeing at the current moment is two lines of logic being applied. 
 One is a bit political, if you like, and culture is seen as a public good. And
 then you have got, on the other hand, an economical line as well, which depends
 on viability. I would like to know how we can reconcile these two lines
 directly, these two world visions in cyberspace. In other words, how can we
 guarantee cultural diversity when it is not viable? Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Then may I call on Delphine Nana.  Delphine.

 >>DELPHINE NANA:  Thank you very much, indeed.  Well, I don't know whether my
 comments will still be pertinent because things have moved on. I am an African
 citizen, pan-African for the simple reason that I am responsible for the
 development area in a pan-African group. I would like to welcome the initiative
 taken by the academy of African languages as well as ISOCs in Africa, taking
 into account our diversity. I also feel that Divina's proposal, when she took
 the floor the second time round, might help linguistic diversity to draw on
 scientific developments which have come about since the Internet first came
 into being. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. One more question from the floor. 
 Vincent Vita, please. Vincent. Oh, yes, here.

 >>VINCENT VITA:  Thank you.  Dear chair, dear panelists.  I am speaking as a
 delegate representative of the union of the provinces of Italy. I would like to
 remark that local governments are, indeed, to be considered as a key actor in
 the multistakeholder arena as to the implementation of the diversity. The local
 government's system is, in fact, responsible for the implementation of national
 plans and policies.  And at the same time is able to plan, experiment, and
 develop e-government projects of (inaudible) and to get and remediate constant
 feedback from the civil society. Within this context of information and the
 communication technologies play a crucial role in (inaudible) a participatory
 process by offering a wide choice of immediate and immense opportunities to
 share and spread knowledge. The efforts made in strengthening a democratic
 framework must include a vast and strong engagement to reduce and (inaudible)
 the Digital Divide at any level, and to make the principles of the knowledge
 society for all come true.  Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. Please.  Microphone please. Microphone
 to Kieren.  Yes, please. I will come back to all of you, and we have already
 received a bunch of questions to answer, so please be prepared to answer your
 questions plus comments because we are closing in 15 minutes time.  But I would
 like to invite Kieren and he can give us some ideas about how others outside
 the hall are thinking in watching this debate. Please.

 >>KIEREN McCARTHY:  There's still quite a bit of discussion going on in the
 chat room, which has been covering nearly all of the discussions that have
 cropped up so I will try to go with the most succinct points. One is about the
 IETF creating guidelines and the discussions about whether it could only be
 open source software that is a solution for translation.  Because otherwise,
 it's too expensive and too complicated. Allison wheeler who is the CEO of Wiki
 media is talking about what they are trying to do with automation software. Ram
 Mohan says the Internet provides a unique way to revitalize a suppressed
 language if a community exists to support it. And a more controversial topic is
 the governments here talking about promoting diversity when the reality is that
 many of them restrict the import of foreign content by placing taxes on it.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much.  Very interesting points. Now, who is
 the first?  Divina?

 >>DIVINA FRAU-MEIGS:  I wanted to answer the question about existing
 initiatives.  We have to stress that there are an awful lot of them.  We're not
 at the very beginning of this.  Academics didn't hold fire and wait for
 governments to start introducing this type of policy. What we don't have is an
 assessment, as such.  And also standards defined together on interoperability.
 There are, for example, initiatives which have been brought in by UNESCO, FAO,
 directly related to women in world communities.  These have been up and running
 for decades now. United Nations have done an awful lot of things as well. So we
 now have a complete open-source backbone from the machine systems right through
 to the desktops. So there are no further excuses in terms of free access online
 development.  The tools are there, they are free.  They work on a cooperative
 basis.  But there are commercial and economic interests.  There are some hybrid
 platforms being set up now, though, between civil society and private partners.
  Microsoft, for example, in Africa, in particular. All this is developing. The
 solutions are there.  They are generally kept under wraps.  But there are some
 general virtual communities currently developing products and dealing with this
 question of sustainable development.  We have to make it more visible. Turning
 now....

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Well, we have ten minutes and everybody has to speak. Yes.

 >>RIYADH NAJM:  Thank you.  Perhaps the -- just the last -- one of the last
 questions that we heard from one of the audience and that is how can we have
 diversity -- cultural diversity on the Internet when it is not commercially
 viable?  And this is really, if we can address these type of questions
 genuinely and openly, I think we can come up with complete solutions on how we
 can carry this on forward. This goes back to the roots of how the Internet has
 developed over the years, that everything that you see on the Internet must
 have commercial viability to begin with to have it introduced.  Otherwise, it
 might not take off. And with having this background all the time, we will
 always have issues on the Internet that we really cannot have be implemented.
 So maybe what we need now to conclude from panels or sessions like this is how
 do we -- what do we do now? The Internet governance, this is all about -- this
 forum is all about the Internet Governance.  And unless we have all the
 stakeholders of the Internet be participating in that governance, we cannot
 really fulfill all that we need. So we need to have this good participation
 from the stakeholders in governing the Internet, and this way we will be able
 to have all our ambitions fulfilled in the Internet.  And that is probably also
 by introducing the open standards, open source softwares, things of that
 nature.  That will enable not only the able or the haves in having the equal
 access to the Internet but also the have-nots. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Alex, please.

 >>ALEX CORENTHIN:  Thank you. I would like to answer your question on software
 and how we can encourage its development, the development of tools, in other
 words, in order to promote diversity. Yes, an awful a lot of initiatives
 already exist. I'm not going to quote them all here, for reasons of
 advertising. But I think the point is that we should be talking about the tools
 to be made available to the final user. The best-use platform is windows, as
 we've seen from the statistics. Let's be realistic. That's the way things
 stand. But what we should be thinking about is the question of copyright and
 intellectual property. But what about the interface? In other words, taking
 account of the actual usage should exist beyond the intellectual property
 rights. Because it would be easy for us to remove the barriers of own content
 these days. What about Microsoft with Word? It's not possible today, because
 the interface belongs to someone. The whole of the international community
 should stand up and say, "No, it doesn't belong to the person who actually
 produced the software, but, rather, to the interLOCuTOR." And that's very
 important when we're looking into this issue.

 >>NURUL KABIR:  I'm very happy that some of the questions here mentioned about
 the developing countries' concern to how to develop the capacity to develop
 content and promoting multilingual languages. That is a very good point. And
 here I have a solution that because the capacity developing needs funding and
 support. In this regard, for the developing countries, I think it is very
 important to support them for the capacity development. And there are some
 portion that arizes, the standardization and best practices, which is also part
 of the capacity developing, which can also need some support and funding. And
 it is also important the creating of the economic value and commercial value.
 If we do not create the value in the marketplace, I don't find a reason to
 develop the capacity. Capacity definitely is related to the demand and the
 supply. And sometimes we have to create demand. And that's why the local
 content development should have a good emphasis to see the market opportunity
 and market access. Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  I really want to have everybody say, and please be brief.
 May I have Andrzej, please.

 >>ANDRZEJ BARTOSIEWICZ:  Just short comment on the software issue. As my
 colleague said, that there must be the market demand for the software. And when
 we were starting implementing Internationalized Domain Names five years ago,
 people were shouting, "There's no software to support, et cetera." And that was
 true. But when there were more and more ccTLDs, for example, and gTLDs
 implementing Internationalized Domain Names, the software vendors found out
 that there is market demand. So they have to provide the IDN support in the
 browsers, in the operating systems. And Microsoft, in my opinion, personal
 opinion, were delaying the software, the IDN support in windows because there
 was no demand. And it's very reasonable. And when there were a lot of
 implementations of Internationalized Domain Names in the last two years, we
 have the new windows, we start with IDN support and intellectual explorer
 version 7. So there is no -- there is normal market relations. And if there is
 demand, there is software. And, therefore, this is our role, and especially
 people they are attending IGF, to promote this, to facilitate, to make this
 demand in the local communities in the countries.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. Who's next? Elizabeth.

 >>ELIZABETH LONGWORTH:  Thank you. To address your question, how do you support
 language and script that are not commercially viable, it's true that the
 operating systems, for example, of Microsoft I think some months ago there were
 over -- represented over 101 languages. So where you have emerging markets, you
 can have the market taking care of it. But it doesn't take care of all of them.
 And, therefore, we have to find incentives and other forms of value. Three
 quick ideas. Language and script is a mirror and a vector of our culture. So it
 reveals a knowledge legacy that goes well beyond preserving our heritage. It
 opens up to local knowledge systems. So we have -- it's about the perceptions
 of value. So we have to convince ourselves and our communities and we have to
 equip them so they can create the demand and catalyze this process. Second
 point is that there are other techniques, for example, for the Unicode
 submissions, could we not have a sponsor a language or a script so that at
 least we can take care of that short-term process. I would remind that there
 are also political commitments that are being made by governments in the
 various declarations and conventions that should be enforced at the national
 government level. But we need all the elements. None of them are mutually
 exclusive. We need the open source. We need the proprietary emphasis. We need
 the emerging markets. But most of all, we have to convince that there are other
 forms of value, social value, and value inherent in the knowledge that then
 promotes the development and is the access to development. If we don't take
 care of that, then we cannot have the social and economic development.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  I have time for two or three more people. Keisuke.

 >>KEISUKE KAMIMURA:  Well, I may be reiterating some of the points that have
 been made already, but let me do it again. We have technology, we have already
 technology or technical solution to the problem of local content or localized
 tools for development, such as Unicode and other localized operating systems.
 But localization or local content will only come at a cost. Putting
 multilingualism in place is a tedious work, which requires time and effort. And
 most of the time, it means money and people's labor. So the question we are now
 facing is not technology -- not the technology itself, rather, how to put
 required resources together to ensure multilingualism. And another point I
 would like to make is that localization software -- I'm sorry, because I'm an
 expert on localization of software, I keep mentioning that topic again. But
 localizing of software is often regarded -- has often been regarded as a
 commercial issue. But looking back on history, commercial viability alone does
 not seem to explain how localized software has been developed. And localization
 software has become an issue of political lobbying or something like that. Take
 a few examples. Let me take a few examples. An ethic group in Europe encourages
 a software company to provide localized products by providing subsidies. They
 gave money to the particular software vendor to develop their own localized
 products. And another example would be an African country, which is reportedly
 to have talked the company, the same company, into providing linguistic support
 for one of their official languages. So that way, localization of software has
 been an issue of political lobbying. So but I'm not arguing against such
 politicalness of software localization. It is good as long as two conditions
 are met. One is that it promotes the benefits for all. And the other is that it
 provides the level of fairness and equity that all of us can agree on. Thank
 you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you. Adama.

 >>ADAMA SAMASSEKOU:  Thank you. Well, I think I should just say that we're not
 at the beginning of this. In 2003, we had the first stage of the summit in
 Geneva. And various points were adopted by the international community. And we
 wanted an inclusive system for everyone. The commitments were further
 strengthened in Tunis, and the prospects for the development. Now we're talking
 about Internet governance, which really puts us before this issue of
 participation for all. My major concern is how we are going to continue. I
 would really strongly suggest that we should move towards establishing
 multistakeholder programs, with partners who have been working on this question
 of multilingualism for many years now, decades. UNESCO, first and foremost, in
 terms of the content. The ITU, which has been dealing with it from the
 infrastructure side. So this partnership between UNESCO and the ITU, with ICANN
 as well, which is more or less managing Internet, if you like, and different
 bodies, such as our own, in the different regions of the world. It's the
 African language federation for Africa. We've got an international network, a
 global network for language diversity. Divina, I think, is the most
 representative voice up here on the panel for that. But we've got the elements
 to allow for this multistakeholder approach to cover all of these issues, take
 them on board, and come up with some specific programs. We shouldn't be asking
 these questions along these lines, how can we guarantee cultural diversity when
 it's not viable. Well, that's what's there at the beginning. We've gone beyond
 that. It's got to exist. We have to talk about how we're going to mobilize
 resources, have the political will so that we can make this a multilingual,
 diverse world which is enriched by humanity. [ Applause ]

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. And last speaker, Patrik.

 >>PATRIK FALTSTROM:  Thank you very much. Just very quickly, I think to -- if
 it is the case that we are going to do something, of course, we hear that the
 one important thing is that the tools are localized in local languages so local
 content can be created. And I see personally that many developed countries that
 actually do have money, they are using content management system and software
 that is not easy to localize. So many of the systems, for example, in Sweden
 handle only Swedish or only English. And that's pretty bad. So I think both --
 we should all force commercial and help open software development to actually
 develop tools that are easily localizable and easily internationable. Because
 that will make the world easier for everyone. So I challenge all the
 governments through their public procurement processes in the developed world
 to make sure that they are using good software of all different kinds that, in
 turn, when they are created, will make it easier for the undeveloped world.
 Thank you.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Now it's time to close. And I will hand my microphone to
 NIKOLAY.

 >>CHAIRMAN VASSILEV:  Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, first of all,
 I would like to look at the clock. So we have to be relatively disciplined and
 finish relatively soon so that other people can come to the next session. And I
 would like to summarize within only a few minutes. Let me use the opportunity
 to thank very much the moderator, who's been able to press us all to speak very
 briefly and in a very organized way. So according to my count, including
 himself, about 58 people were able to speak. This is, I think, a very good
 achievement, within less than three hours, 58 people. So I think that we should
 all agree that this was a very good job done. Also, I would like to use the
 opportunity again to thank our hosts, who have organized so well this
 conference. And, of course, our 12 participants sitting at this panel here.
 Now, I've been taking extensive notes, so I could be able to summarize more or
 less what everyone said. Also, our hosts were extremely helpful and they
 provided me with some bullet points, which are an alternative summary of
 everything said. Just considering the timing issue, I would not like to go into
 many details, just to say that all of us learned a lot. This was a very useful
 session. There are many conclusions that we, as policymakers, will be able to
 use as well, not only the technology people, the academic -- academicians, and
 the business people. So many issues were discussed deeply, many questions were
 raised, and sometimes asking the right question or the right issue is equally
 important to finding the correct answer. Two of the phrases that I will
 personally remember very strongly are, for example, one of them by Mr.
 Samassekou, who said that the digital divide is or might be less important than
 the linguistic divide. And that's the one that we also have to bridge in the
 future. And also several people spoke about the problems for people with
 disabilities, different types of disabilities, the disadvantaged people,
 children, so people in a difficult position for a number of reasons. So, of
 course, governments and the international public should do a lot to accommodate
 those people, whether these are the 17% people with physical disabilities or
 illiterate people, or people living in poorer economic conditions. So I would
 like to thank also everyone in the room for being so active and participating
 so well. Have a nice day, and thank you very much.

 >>YOSHINORI IMAI:  Thank you very much. [ Applause ]