The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. 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 event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: So I think we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for coming to join us at this workshop today focus on Universal Acceptance. I hear something else. Is that another word trip going on right now? We'll talk nice and loud so that we can hear each other over the other workshop. So I'll take a couple minutes to introduce who we have here on stage. Keep in mind this is a workshop and the goal is to have vocal collaboration on this issue. We'll try to frame the issue a little bit and maybe start with a couple of stories on why universal acceptance is important. My name is Christian Dawson and I am ‑‑ I run a trade association called the I2 Coalition. Infrastructure Coalition. We rack and stack data and service centers Cloud infrastructure guys. So hopefully when we talk about ‑‑ when we explain what Universal Acceptance is, our interest in the subject will be relatively evident. We have a seat right here for you.
>> This is what happens when you show up late.
[Laughter]
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: So to my right, my co‑moderator for today is Paul Mitchell and Paul Mitchell is with Microsoft. Next to Paul, we have (inaudible) and he's with the electronic transactions development agency of Thailand. Is that correct? And then we have Edmon Chun from Asia. And finally, Tony Harris with Cabas. Then in the back, we have Jim.
>> JIM PRENDERGAST: Hello.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: We have Park. I don't know the affiliation there. We have Pentry who will be one of our remote panelists and I know that is it. Okay. Wonderful. Pentry will be joining us in a few minutes. We also have in the front Carolina Aguerre. She'll take the good ideas and putting it into a report so that we can continue this conversation passed IGF. Thank you, Carolina, for doing that. So my really brief overview and focus on my own interest on this sent will lead into more technical description of what we're talking about when we discuss what Universal Acceptance is. Ultimately what we are talking about from my perspective when we're looking at Universal Acceptance is we need to make sure that the world's internet connected systems match what fields are in the global right. This is not a new issue. This is not something that's sprung up with new TLDs. What we ‑‑ what we have ‑‑ what we have today is a system wherein the traditional ‑‑ okay. Sorry. There's a tremendous opportunity in the modern TLD set to connect the next billion and beyond with the IBM systems with all ‑‑ the guys that are not modern set. The issue is not that these ‑‑ that these ‑‑ there is any problem with the TLD. The issue is that the world's e‑mail systems and web browsers, the world's web mail forms, the world's database systems are not necessarily compliant with the modern data set. The scope of that problem is huge because what we're talking about is pretty much every coder who develops interconnected systems who needs to verify their systems against the modern TLD set. The subject of Universal Acceptance is an outreach sent. What we're dealing with here is not policy. It's trying to figure out how we can get to the coders of the world, all of the people that create the various connected system that built the internet up to the application layer and beyond and to make sure that they can update systems and create new systems that will allow the complete modern and changing TLD system to work every step along the way. We basically need to connect the entire world. Mark, you want to give some more technical clarity to what I am talking about here?
>> MARK SVANCAREK: So we've been defining Universal Acceptance the ability to accept, restore, to processed and to display all the top level domains and the IDMs and the internationalized e‑mail addresses. And that includes the ability to validate them as well. As you know when you sign up for e‑mail address, when you sign up for an account with your bank or your travel company, they'll usually ask you to create an identity based on an e‑mail address and if you type in an internationalized e‑mail address, you are likely to get an enter valid e‑mail address. If you enter in a new TLD, you are likely to get please enter valid e‑mail address. So that's part of the validation is when you are accepting them, it's not just ins user interface. It is not just being able to accept codes in the input box. It is also able to validate this is a well formed string. It's probably a real e‑mail address. I will accept it and process it. I think part of this is the use of uni code. Most of the Internet the way that helps interact with the Internet today is based on ASCII, which is an older in coding system that uses the Latin character set with numerals and punctuation marks. Well as the uni code is millions. So using any alternate script is going to require uni code. Using uni code is important. There are lots of systems that use uni code as well as a 16 gig version of uni code 16F16. So once you have written your code to use uni code, now you can begin to become universally acceptant. It's when you have a lot of hard coded dependencies on ASCII that you run into problems. There's a brings principle called the robust principle. You know, many years ago. It's be conservative in what you do, but be liberal in what you accept. There are a lot of software and products and services that are using older forms, ASCII base e‑mail addresses, e‑mail addresses that use A‑labels in the domain portion. You should be able to take these in, accept them and process them, but you shouldn't be generating themselves. You should be generating, you know, IDMs in the domain portion. You should be generating portions in the ADI. You should be age to create documentation if you are a decoder or CIO so that you can write your software to be universally accepted so you can maintain existing software to make it Universally Acceptant and you can have a conversation with your software vendors to verify are you Universally Acceptance or not. Sometimes when you begin that conversation, they will say MI what? I don't know what this is. Why you need that? I don't know. Maybe I could change my software, but I will charge you more. So you can, you know, this is how you begin that conversation with them. Thank you.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: We will spend the bulk of the workshop on how, how we will do this outreach. But I will like to start by giving a little bit more framing as to the why, why this is important. I was hoping that you would be willing to give us a little bit of your explanation on why this is a vital topic.
>> When we talk about electric transaction development in my government, the thing I would like to frame this issue into aspect. Yesterday we had some discussion and coalitions on the Internet call items that relate to USAA in general. The first part of how government is dealing around this is the legal framework that separate the countries. Thailand is one of the countries that you don't have the legal framework. When you talk about the robust, reliability of network, when you look into the (inaudible), that's how Thailand gets into the transaction and situations are working groups and we are defining that and they demonstrate telling and the company have to (inaudible) in English up to them. When we check the timing, when you want to have that data, you don't have serenity, the Thai government has to obtain the credential from them. So then that's how we step in to identify the gaps on the legal issues. You cannot release the whole DR history that we just described. You cannot identify them anymore. You can't form into the (inaudible) of the credentials. That is the first part of the government. And then after that, we start to follow because then the other caller users are coming out that you saw yesterday. It is working in all probability. But what Thailand learned is capability of the committee, the art, and culture. When we start to work on RGR, that's called labor generation rules from the technical they call GNSO or (inaudible) scopes that we participate. Even on the Thai, we have one language that have a script 3 million people spoken, but they cannot put it in the web. It's in the northern part. Without any guess and work on the technical, you cannot see the west missing. I'm taking a (inaudible) after I go to (inaudible). I have a sharp to (inaudible) northern part. That's spoken that language. People are they thought their scripts would be put in the internet in the future. They thought they were left behind. This is all western people sitting there. We call them as a design center. They design locals and everything and they thought how they can put that in the internet. They have the front. They have to develop their own in the work, but they don't know how to put it in the IDN. Instead, we have half a plan to do it. That's why I do see the government should ‑‑ should also approach the communities and see of what needs to be done. We can form the groups and everybody is in the same meeting rooms and we have a lot of discussion and plan what we're going to do and that's a starting point in the frames that they're thinking.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: That's fantastic. I would like to see remote panelists that has anything remote to help us frame the importance.
>> I think we have a sound issue on the remote. So can we maybe skip to the next person and try to get that in e‑mail?
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Absolutely. Is there anyone here that would like to make comments on why this is important before we move on to how we're going to do something about it. Tony?
>> TONY HARRIS: Yes. Good morning. My name is Tony Harris and I'm also a registry for Dotlab. It is currently being launched for the Latin America community in general. I think first of all I would say the following. We should consider this issue as very important for very simple reason. The critical sources of the Internet which currently coordinated through ICANN have been updated. We're no longer talking about an Internet where you have dot com, dot net and dot org and the country codes and you have four addresses. That doesn't exist anymore. The internet has to be updated on the numbers side, IPv6. It has to be deployed much better, much more consistently than is happening right now. Latin America doesn't get the 5% implementation and there are no more IPV4 addresses. That's one problem. The updating of let's say providing more choice in generic domain names has come to surpass through the 700 or more domain names that have already launched. In Latin America people don't know this particularly, even in our service industry, we have hundreds of them in Argentina small and medium companies and then we get a trouble call at the call center involving the domain name. The person using it would say it doesn't work and that's not true. Domain works whether they're IDNs or not. The problem is what is dealing with that request when somebody is trying to send an e‑mail or see a website which involves these new domains. So basically, um, what I'm trying to get to the point to say is we should not consider there is a problem with UGTLDs or domain names. The problem is, as it has been said before, with the definitions that programmers and coders have taken upon themselves to implement in their platforms and applications which define addressing parameters. That is what has to be corrected and let's repeat my previous concept. This is about updating the internet because basically whatever organization or platform or application, anything that's running on the internet, if you do not update and comply with these critical resources both on the numbers side and on the domain name side, you are not compatible with what the Internet is today. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Just adding to the why before we get into the how, we touched on a number of technical issues of how we got ourselves here. I guess summarizing that, I guess it is really an assumption that many software developers made that are no longer valid. The assumptions that set a couple of domains and doesn't change over time that much. The assumptions that the length and types of characters that are accepted in domain is no longer true. In the context here in IGF, it is very important to shine some light on why. What do these new domains or internationalized domain names or addresses provide? What value do they add? I think one of them is very important about diversity and about ‑‑ today, well, actually here at this IGF, many sessions are talking about zero rating. We talk about zero rating as a problem when we talk about access. And here we have a zero rating situation, you know, people unable to go to some topical domains and domain names. So, this is how I guess civil society as government, this is what you might want to think about this issue. When we talk about the internet supporting development, supporting local economic and social developments, supporting local mobilization, we need the local languages to work well with the internet infrastructure and that's part domain names. We need the technical community to implement certain things. One of the biggest challenges, however, is that the commercial interest today cannot see the demand yet. Why? Users themselves don't know they can actually do it. So, of course they're not asking their ISPs, they're not asking providers to actually provide the service. They don't even know. The very important part going back to governments and civil society is that we're looking at a situation where the technology is actually there. It's not fully implemented. The technology, the standards and protocols are there, but it is not fully implemented. So we're looking at a market failure here. The commercial interest cannot see the potential and therefore intervention is in play. As a society and government, certain policies are pushed, certain advocacy is required. And that's really where we are with this issue. End my note with the recent passing ‑‑ the recent Sustainable Development Goals that were established in United Nations. This issue of Universal Acceptance is part of SDG. As part of from government or from civil society as you plan, your activities around SDG, I think Universal Acceptance needs to be part of it because it talks about local development, it talks about diversity, it talks about development in that context.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Thank you. I think we have this ready.
>> We'll make remote participation work. It may be just audio. Pentry, are you there? I see she's speaking on the screen, but we don't have the audio. I'm not sure whether that's her very faintly or whether that's the panel next door. Okay. Pentry, are you there?
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: While we're trying to get Pentry, Mark has one last point.
>> MARK SVANCAREK: On one of the points about diversity, I was reading on one of the many DNS studies and they noticed there was a strong correlation between creation of local content and local hosting. So if the registries were local and the services were hosted locally, there was the creation of a lot more content in the local script and then the local hosting was strongly correlated to the use of IDNs. So you can see right there a chain from IDNs to diverse creation of content.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Before I jump into the next point, Jim, how are we doing?
>> JIM PRENDERGAST: Still working on it.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Let's jump into the what are we going to do section of the workshop. I'd like to frame this by introducing those of you that are not familiar. The Universal Acceptance steering group which is a community created by multi‑stakeholder group that came together around ICANN 52 in Singapore. It's not an official ICANN group. It's an outreach group that did start in an ICANN unite, but we have since gone to ICANN and received some funding for the actions that we wish to do around Universal Acceptance outreach, but that may be one of many groups that we turn to for funding the operations. I think that everybody here up on stage and many of the people that I see in the audience are in some way connected to the Universal Acceptance steering group. If I had one take away that I will preview for you at the end of the workshop, I would say getting involved with the Universal Acceptance steering group on this topic should be the number 1 take away when you leave this workshop wanting to do. This work group is not going to solve universal acceptance issues. It is a coordinating efforts body. The goal is to try to assess the scope of the issue, to try to figure what players are doing with the issue and try to get people to maximize the value of the work that's happening on this issue throughout the community. And so when you think of USASG, think of us ‑‑ the guys that are trying to figure out how to take care of the various efforts.
>> Yeah, Christian, we can't get Pentry on the audio, but I do have a statement I can read from her. Providers think Internet as a global and English is widely used as a common language. This is why local or Thai language would be needed. Perception creates a barrier of Internet usage for the rest of the Thai people which is 85% or 60 million people who lack English literacy. We need to communicate with these groups so they can get how Universal Acceptance is important for the users and they can start to accept it in their system to have a chance for the rest.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Fantastic. Thank you. So I mentioned that the USASG is trying to do work in the efforts and you can get involved in that organization by going to ICANN.org/universalacceptance.
>> MARK SVANCAREK: I think I turned on this a little bit before that CIOs don't necessarily know that this is an issue and they don't know what options are available to them. As a result, they don't know that they should be examining their existing systems and existing vendors for compliance with the new standards of the modern Internet. And there was a talk discussion about this at ICANN in Dublin a few weeks ago where someone was explaining their experience as a CIO trying to audit the state of acceptance with their own corporate network. It was very difficult because the documentation doesn't exist, the vendors didn't know. Some of the local internal line of business applications had been written by developers that were no longer there. And it was a very difficult situation for them to even assets their status let alone move it ahead. So we're creating some guides to help CIOs understand on understand what are the issues, what is going to be available and how to talk to your vendors so that you can determine what situation you're in.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Some of the work we have been doing is going out and reaching and speaking at events. Tony, you have been doing that for years and even before the USAG came together. You want to talk about the efforts you have been doing from early time.
>> TONY HARRIS: It is quite some years ago when you had the first generic domains added like dot info, dot co‑op. If they were more than three characters, they were not resolving. Way back in 2004, United America we did around consultation with a lot of other countries that were involved with networking and they looked at it to see if this was something we were ‑‑ this is from a core equipment. The response was in every case that has to do with ISP equipment. These are the definitions and software definitions from e‑mail platforms, corporate systems, et cetera. And since then, there was a sort of ‑‑ I wouldn't say a huge effort, but there was some contingency of communications on this issue. I know people that have a dot info e‑mail address and sometimes even today it is not recognized. And that has been acted as a domain name since 2003 or 2004. That's one thing which we have tried to keep alive and I think basically that outreach is extremely important. What I have proposed to the globe is that we have some sort of repository where we can centralize complaints. It was a trouble ticket in a carrier. So we know who we have to go and talk to and ring the doorbell and say look. You have this problem in the system. Please fix it. That is something that was still debating. Thank you.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: So we have broken down this subject within the USASG and a couple of different components. The first is we are trying to address the top line issues. So we figure out what the specific technical issues are and what are the resolutions. That's important information that we need to take and convey and it's something that in part Mark is working on. But we're also doing metrics and measurements. And that's trying to figure out exactly what the scope of the issue is and how effective they are at dealing with these issues over time. We have specific working groups that are focused on IDN issues and e‑mail address issues. AII may be the most difficult aspect of trying to deal with universal acceptance issues because they internationalize e‑mail address. It passes through so many systems and each system needs to be able to deal with that ‑‑ with that character set every step along the way. If there's one that doesn't, you're going to have problems.
So we're taking all this information that we are gathering and collaborating with a number of different groups and funneling them into outreach efforts that are fairly (inaudible) right now. Because the work of the group from technical perspectives and from information gathering perspectives are so important, but so early. We don't exactly know what our best foot forward is going to be when we go is to technical and non‑technical communities to try to convince them that they should update their systems which requires cost, which requires time, which requires prioritization, but the work of the communications team is currently focused on taking all this information and developing compelling cases for people to take this issue seriously. And those cases are going to be different depending on the organization that you're doing outreach to. Somebody that is very interested in the issues may need a different quote/unquote pitch and somebody who is interested in just making sure that they can commercially accept all of the TLDs they're seeing on the network. So there are various different aspects and different customer profiles that we're putting to the try and figure out how to best explain that this is an important issue that people should take seriously and try and do something about. One of the things we turn to the community for is to help us answer the questions of how do ‑‑ how do we build these compelling cases? How do you feel we should be going out to communities once we have the answers of what exactly they should be technically doing? How do you think we should be making the case and how do you think we should make the case? We have Paul here to tell us how we can work on some of the issues.
>> PAUL: Before getting into Q&A, I would like to make a couple other points. I think it was pretty clear from everybody's conversation that this is a multi‑layered problem that needs to be addressed systemically. It can't be ‑‑ I think it is easy to recognize that there is a lot of technical work going on in some of the largest providers on the planet to try to address the Cloud layer what some of these issues are since increasingly Cloud platforms are being used to deliver services. So it is no longer the developer that writes his own code and creates his own application that sticks in the box and he writes his own little tool. The reality is that everybody has to rely on platforms. There's Linux, there's IOS, et cetera. But all of those platforms have to be adapted appropriately to address the issues. In many ways, this is an exception of a different kind of universal acceptance problem that folks in the accessibility community have known about for years and years and have been increasingly make their platforms usable by people who can't see or people who can't hear or who have a variety of other issues, cognitive disabilities. This is a layer on that on the Cloud side. And on the other side, all the major vendors are engaged.bi at the same time, there's a problem that needs a lot of engagement by the time that use those platforms in the same way that solving the accessibility problem at a platform level really needed engagement and needs continual engagement by the time who are in the accessibility community. Whichever the correct terminology is for that, Andrea will correct me later I'm sure. That's an issue. And this issue is similar. It really needs the people who are affected. We heard about the issue in Thailand. The language goes away if everybody has to use English or Latin character set or more Universal Accepted system than, you know, than their own language. And, you know, we now have cultural anthropologist running around the world trying to save languages that are disappearing because, you know, they don't have a significant written history or they just aren't usable by the technologies in play today because of that. What I need from this audience is your stories about challenges and issues. We heard one already about Thailand. I will wonder if any of you would like to provide an example of a situation that you've personally been involved in that would really shine the light on the issue and actually talk a little bit about, you know, how you resolved it or what you need to resolve it. Any volunteers? Right there in the front.
>> Hello. My name is (inaudible). I'm from Russia. As you know, Asia Pacific is home to probably the biggest number of languages which are not yet represented or not adequately represented on the Internet. Still a couple of points to make. First of all, yes indeed, we saw the rise of IDMs and that was quite encouraging especially in the case of Russia when we had ‑‑ when they launched IDM, I was a part of the team at the time and when we had that story 400,000 registrations overnight and 700,000 registrations in just three days after the lunch. And that part explains beneath for IDMs and Universal Acceptance services. For Russians, let's say Chinese and Thais and many other nations, it probably would (inaudible) whatever script symbols is a challenge itself. So as it was explained more than 80% of Russians and Chinese, I believe, that figure is about 85%. So we have no command of any language whatsoever. You can imagine how hard it is. Although for English speaking people as well as any people that use a Latin base script, it is not that big a problem. Believe me. This is a serious challenge. Without any TLD, a small group which basically deals with the issue of EAI. So, there is pressure about that and some of them attended that workshop in Dublin and I think it came up with a certain ideas and certain solutions of how to bolster there work and corporation. What really strikes me though is that you talk about this steering committee, formal steering committee for this project. And I talked to Don Hollander. The next meeting will be in Washington D.C. Out of seven members or so, five are based in Washington D.C. It is logical to hold that meeting in Washington D.C. Well, my perspective would be try Moscow, try any other place where people are around where service providers are around and look them straight into their eyes and tell them what their problems and grievances are and listen to success stories. I personally enjoy Washington D.C. I share your passion for weather D.C, but still that's my point. I believe for EAI, it is important to keep the wheels kind of rolling. Anyway, you know, just to keep that momentum and to build those relations with people who are passionate. (inaudible) and Chinese and whatever other scripts. Thank you.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: As somebody living in Washington D.C, I think those are very important notes that we should take to heart. Thank you.
>> ANDREA SAX: I've ‑‑ Paul, I'm not going to correct you because you can call us the accessibility committee at any time. But when you call us a disable community, we will take mention. I want to throw something out there to the panelists. It has been discussed in the Dynamic Coalition of accessibility and disability and I didn't identify myself. I am told by the captioners. They know my voice. This is Andrea Sax and I am the coordinator for that coalition. One of our blind persons Jerry Ellis has brought this up several times. Wouldn't it be comfortable if platforms actually had accessibility tools built into them? So you didn't have to lug your screen reader all over the globe. You can tap in, have your own profile and be able to access a tool or an assisted technology. I am throwing that out to you. I don't think it's actually been done. It is something we have discussed in our own group. Then we get into the situation if you do put a profile in that would do this. We have to have some form of protection for that person who would obviously need to be able to find to do this so it wasn't abuse. That's a question and a request at the same time. Thank you.
>> I think that's a very interesting suggestion and although it is not directly related to Universal Acceptance, I see a lot of correlation there. We were talking about an input or ‑‑ well, input and display in many sense. Display not in the sense of a visual, but in a sense for somebody who is visually impaired to get the information out. And that relates me to one of the things about internationalized domain names is that especially for accessibility, you would ‑‑ a person with visual disability may need more so to be able to navigate the Internet in their own language, to read out a domain name in English alphabet is probably more difficult for somebody who is not typing. And that relates a lot. I actually haven't thought about it that way. I often talk about how when mobile phones become ‑‑ I mean voice input to mobile phones become more prevalent than the acceptance of internationalized domain names in the Native languages become more used and more relevant. In the case of accessibility, in fact, this is definitely something an overlap where we should work together on. In order to input, in order to use the local language as navigation tools both domain names e and mail addresses, that needs to be in place. At the same time the input method and the tools that you mentioned in terms of attaching on or adding on is very relevant. As they do that, we want to bring Universal Acceptance out there as well. In reverse when we go out to talk about Universal Acceptance, we should bring the accessibility message as well ‑‑ accessibility message as well.
>> I understand we have remote comments.
>> Yes. Also from the ISOC chapter in Uganda, the challenge of the global issues overshadowing African issues. The big companies are promoting their content in Africa. What can they do to promote globalization in Africa for the next billion?
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: That's a great question for the audience here. Anyone have some ideas?
>> You might have to call on somebody, Paul.
>> PAUL: You're a shy bunch this morning. All right. Let's move the discussion a little bit farther forward.
This little comment basically goes to the heart of where services are being created and delivered. And it goes to the question of do people have the capacity, the tools, the information, the technology available to create applications and services that are locally appropriate. That topic comes up in many of the sessions at IGF in terms of sort of a gap, some form of a digital divide that's identified as being lack of appropriate content and services. So perhaps we can spend the next little bit talking about how we may close that gap. Certainly some of you in the audience here have been involved in delivering services and applications outside the major western markets. I wonder if any of you can share an experience, a concern or an idea about how this problem could be addressed. Right there.
>> Also people want to come up to the mic and it's useful for remote participants to be able to see your face. It's up to you whether you want to come up or not.
>> Hello? I'm Daniel Nata from the University of Washington. We at information school what's called the technology and social change group, Seattle we're working with digital literacy and libraries, NGOs and different sectors of society. And basic foundational skills like using cell phones, accessing services, et cetera. But at the same time building libraries, government (inaudible), et cetera. One of the key challenges of working there is the lack of adoption of universal font. They use something called the Wigi standard which was developed prior to universal access during the dictatorship. And they have been struggling to adopt a new standard that would be consist edge with international standards. So I guess the domain name problem, but also to a lot of other basic access issues you can't perform a search real well and they have adopted the Wigi, but all the other Microsoft groups refuse to fill any content tutorials, Word, et cetera doesn't come in their language. I wonder if plans the speaker from Thailand or anyone else had any comments on the integration of that kind of challenge into the problem of Universal Acceptance.
>> Before you leave the mic, you can reintroduce yourself because the remote participants were trying to catch who you were.
>> Daniel Ornatto from Seattle, Washington.
>> What I would like to share here is also related to how address that issue. Thailand has 115 or maybe (inaudible) now. People do not realize it's a problem. That's surprising. When you sit in a meeting together, I don't mention the names, it's just demonstrating to them how (inaudible) is not working in Thai. And everybody is shocked. They don't know about this. The local people have to come together to sit and work. I think the how stepping in Thailand ‑‑ yesterday some talked about end to end and I think I tried to say you have to look at the whole pictures, not the bit and piece. The thing about the IDN and then we integrated and we just (inaudible) the report last night. We have the intersect and all of IBM. We have them work together with ccTLD. Then what makes the commercial plan a lot of people about talk to the minister. A lot of people talk about the E‑government, retaxation, but it is not that anymore. (inaudible) it is totally different. You can do whatever you like. You have to have a network. It is a whole infrastructure from the server name and security aspects on it. You have firewalls and you have to learn to do it and you cannot realize the problem if you don't see. They realize there is a problem and you identify and that could be no. We use the resource that we have and we start moving. I just follow my (inaudible) and you have (inaudible) and start from one and then you go to the other. You're going to changes whole government. You can change one organization and go to another. You started sending the e‑mail in Thai and see where the problem is. One other thing I just mentioned is you have 10 million people. Every department you talk about E and I said somebody talk about the credential secure online. Somebody will have 100 credentials. Imagine the 60 million people that have the credential that don't even know and they can agree. They all have Thai names. A lot of people die without any (inaudible) of their English names because they carry national ID in Thai. They never travel. So they don't get a passport. This is the society we live with and then one day with the internet, you are ‑‑ you have a first time of the English and then you don't even know how to type the keyboards. We have to stop internally the government. We try to regulate all (inaudible) and they have to use the Thai e‑mail, if it's ready. The government needs to give the (inaudible) and communicate to the communication suppliers to make sure the market is there and this is what the country will do. They don't like to discriminate or isolate the market, but is they suppliers to understand the importance of these issues and the market will open to everybody that could be able to configure or to make it interrupt to our (inaudible) and language.
>> So building on what he was saying, I think looking at the condition ‑‑ well, hopefully a generation ‑‑ that's a great opportunity. The government and government policies and government procurement policies are going to help a lot. And going back to your questions specifically actually, I think, earlier last month in Dublin, we had a workshop and then a public section on this topic. I recall an observation from Jeff Houston of AP Nick. At AP Nick, it's a registry for IP addresses; however, they did a study ever all their systems and looking at where Universal Acceptance is an issue. His observation is in line with what you were saying. It's not only an issue about domain names and e‑mail address. It is the shift from asking Legacy and coding into unicode. A lot of systems break down in that case. We go back to what Mark mentioned of how we store it, validate it, process it accept it and display it. All of those issues have to do with the software itself, but moving from ASCII or Legacy and coding into unicode itself. So I think what you mentioned is highly relevant to what we do and I think that's probably a suggestion to when we think about the CIO document, we should include some of the related issues as well and moving from ASCII and Legacy and coding into unicode is certainly what we think about. You are solving that issue and many places are still solving ‑‑ trying to solve the issue moving from ASCII to the unicode world.
>> Mark from Microsoft. I would like to jump back just a minute. There was a question remotely regarding Africa. I have a procedural answer for you. If ‑‑ in order to encourage the next billion people and emphasize Africa, first you need to insure that your language is in the unicode encoding. So that's done through the unicode consortium. You have them working to make sure that your language is represented as code points in unicode. Then after that, you need to put together a label generation rules. Those are the rules for how you can deify that. If you have a language like Thai, which is a single nation, that can be pretty straight forward. If you have a language ‑‑ if you have a character set like Cyrillic or Arabic, which is shared by many languages and many cultures, then that will be a multi‑stakeholder effort to create generation rules. So your conditions may carry and then once this is done, once your language is represented in the unicode, once your label generation rules have been defined, then you can focus on local hosting and creation of local content using those characters, using domain names e and mail addresses based on those characters and that will be a way to move forward the development in your country.
>> The way that this works is an incredible number of touch points. You had said you may not be able to change a government, but you can change an organization. Sometime its is really, really difficult to change an organization. My background, I used to run a small web hosting company. We had around 60 employees and one of the things I wanted to do when I got involved in Universal Acceptance is go to my own organization and say let's go ahead and be an example and push forward with our own initiative and we started cataloging the systems that needed to be update, just the systems that we use. And my tech team came back and said this is beyond our control. The systems that we use even if we update to most receipt versions here are a list of examples. I'm looking at it now, which have no support that are works in progress that would undermine the ability for us to effectively use our systems in the way we use them today. We can't get there from here. And one of the reasons I wanted to be involved in this program is that I knew it wasn't about going out to hosting providers. It was going out to coders, the people developing the system and trying to influence them to update their systems so that we can then go back to the hosters and say here's a path. It's an incredibly complex Eco system we're trying to address and unfortunately at this point, there are no easy answers. We just need help continuing to get the word out.
>> ANDREW SULLIVAN: Hi. My name is Andrew Sullivan. I'm here from the cranky deep layer of the internet. I do technical work and ICANN is something that I worked on some years ago. I want to slight refine of what you said. And I think this is important for people who are interested in this. It is not language base. It's got to do with the writing system and it's got to do with the script. So the reason that if you're using a script like Arabic or Arabic is a good example for Africa because there are a lot of African languages using Arabic characters and the use of Arabic in that case is not the same as the use of Arabic in the use of that language or other languages. In order to make this work in the Internet, you have to collaborate with everybody else about how those characters are used and that's the reason this is very complicated because the Internet is a global medium even though languages are local. So what you're trying to do is localize the experience of the Internet. You're trying to make it work well for local users, but you are trying to do that in a context where order people can use that in a radically different way. So right now, I understand I can continue to work on these LGRs for some of these multiple writing systems scripts. That's what we call the collection of characters and it's important that if people are interested in this that they participate in that now. There's a whole set of pages at ICANN devoted to this. This is a practical thing that people who have writing system and linguistics expertise can get involved in. You don't have to have a lot of technical background, but it would be helpful. You need to be able to contribute on the basis of how the writing system works. I would encourage people to get help with that. So this is ‑‑ it sounds right ‑‑ I was sitting there and it sounds initially like this is just a lack of will that people have not engaged with this. But there is a really hard policy problem and sort of interoperability problem in user space rather than on computer space. You need to work on how these things are going to work practically for the real helps that will use them because you will introduce a lot of confusion with these characters. I wanted to make sure that the distinction is here. Thank you.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: This resonated with the remote participants in Uganda. They have reached a content with the language and the geographic region.
>> Would you like us to bring you a mic? Would you come up to ‑‑
>> Who needs a mic?
>> No? You didn't? I see. Sorry.
>> Hello? Okay. I'm from Nigeria. One of our colleagues just spoke about scripts. I'm looking to come up from all these troubling issues. We have options to be provided for the translator, the kind of (inaudible) options that we're going to access the Internet that you have an option to choose a particular language. They now translate the region you belong to, whatever ethnic (inaudible) you belong to. So it would be easier than a script so on and so forth. I'm looking at something like that if it is possible.
>> Once the fundamental technologies function, the underlying technologies in all these systems can communicate in the various scripts. There's no telling what applications can be built on top of that in order to make things more usable and tolerable between various scripts and languages. The issue ‑‑ that is a place that we absolutely want to get to. The issue at hand is that we need to basically communicate with every code around the planet in order to get there.
[Laughter]
Am I overstating here?
>> I don't want to make this sound too impossible. Yes many coders are on the planet that need to be involved, but it's definitely a solvable issue. A lot of this technology exists in one form or the other. Some ever the technology in your scenario exists today, just not in this particular context. Editors exist today. It is just you don't use them when you access the internet. So there is a foundation for a lot of this. It just needs to be extended and defined and tested in a holistic end to end way. So I'm quite confident about the technical challenge. It is big. And it is international, but I'm seeing progress even in the last year. So I don't want anyone to give up hope. This is step by step. We're making progress.
>> So the organizations can start to set the tone and they're in the process of making huge progress huge. I was being hyperbolic on purpose because I was queuing up some take aways as we are starting to get near the end of our session today. I wanted to talk again about the Universal Acceptance steering group. There are really two areas in which we can use your help. One is we need more participants. If you would like to get involved, you would like to put in your two sense, would like to get involved in the calls, like to help us out with outreach best applied, we can really use your assistance. The other thing is beyond the actual work that we do, we are attempting within the USASG to be a coordinating body as much as we are a body that does work for that itself. We're trying to engage with organizations from across the Internet Eco system. They're already doing stuff in this area. So we're already engaged, for instance, I2 coalition. Eco, which is German association of the industry. The DNA I mentioned. They're doing a number of important efforts where they're acting now to reach out to people and tell them your scripts aren't working. The systems you are using for your shopping cart aren't monitoring. We started just a couple of weeks ago speaking with individuals that ID and ITF. And that's really important touch point that's being developed now. Thank you, Andrew, for that. We are doing outreach to the MOG community. Mobile group. We're making sure they're being done in a responsible fashion that make sure that we're respectful of not wanting to develop more abuse problems on the Internet as we progress with our systems. There are lots more groups that we need to be plugged into. There are lots more efforts that we're not yet engaged with. So, if you can't commit your time, then get us involved with the organizations that are already doing stuff. And so we can be a better more holistic coordinating body to try and drive things forward.
>> Those are my big asks from this. I will turn to the panelists to see if they have any closing statements.
>> I would like to say in closing we have considered this. I think a lot of the user and the registrant. Just to with look at the other side of the people who have platforms, who require when you're doing a transaction or you're joining an organization or doing home banking, more than not, you are required to address in order to become validated to buy something, to join an organization or maybe to write your opinion. If you do that, you get a message saying (inaudible) because you're using a new domain name, which is not being included in the system that the platform is operating. The organization or the company or whoever is requiring you to enter your data in order to complete your transaction or your sign on will use that interested party. They will lose that interested party or lose an affiliate or new member. So in their interest to update whatever platform they're operating.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: I'd like to mention again to please send us your success stories and your difficulty stories. Oh, there's a question from the audience.
>> Good morning. I'm from here from Brazil. I'm a member of the IGF fellowship program. (inaudible) on what was being said, I would like to make a remark about people from all around the world that are interested in this universal access. What are the ways that you see that are involving the younger generation of the process? Thank you.
>> That is a great question. I'm excited about that question. We had talked about ‑‑ honestly, we need some leadership in this area. Going to ICANN.org/universalacceptance and finding people that can help us generate specific projects around, around engaging the youth, around engaging coders getting ‑‑ going through the education processed. These are things that we very much want. If that's of interest to you, we need your help doing that. There are some ideas that are focused on the outreach. We talk about doing hackathons. These are ideas that I think can be very compelling to that next generation; however, basically a lot is going to happen if we get some leadership to help us make it happen. We have some resources. If it is something of interest to you, help us figure that out.
>> I guess in closing, this is a session I find really refreshing. I've been working on this acceptance thing for many years now. We have ‑‑ as Christian said, we always wanted to identify people who already are doing stuff. We keep looking inwards. At ICANN, we look at registrars. We look inwards in technology, internet technology companies. But this session here I think broadened my view a lot. In order to really bring forward Universal Acceptance, we need to identify allies and we need to build alliances. There are groups ever people out is there including accessibility group, including local content point of view, all these things that at ICANN we tend to think are out of scope is very much in scope because those are the pockets with community that can actually take our message out and spread it to the world. So this for me at least, is very eye‑opening. In fact, we've locked in with so badly, how do we get this out. Actually, there are people doing related stuff that when we lock ourselves in regard than building a new ‑‑ looking to the technology community or the ratio community to do stuff. That is something that's kind of eye‑opening and definitely for USG for the coordination group. Accessibility and local content, you know, these are things that people care passionately about and they can help bring our message out to the relevant people because they are actually doing the advocacy on the issues. If they bring our issue, it is much more stronger. That's something that might take away from the session.
>> I think the last ‑‑ you see a lot of issues that we're getting from here. As they come from the government and the public policy standpoint, I think this issue is all technical. There are so many people that you can lean on when you start to work. You just realize what you can and (inaudible) to us is a lot. That's what I always said to the people. In this problem, use your heart and who you are and you like your kids to know the scripts or (inaudible) and change everything. In terms of (inaudible), use your heart and say how we preserve and how we bring. Internet is not isolating us. We have to work. We have to reach. I think my last mention is the roles of community and we need outreach and work together with a lot of people, the (inaudible), the USG people, the technical people and you find that it's ready and it's not that difficult. A lot ever heads working with the headwork. Thank you.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: Jim, we have a closing statement as well.
>> JIM PRENDERGAST: Yes. We would all like to start supporting systems with Universal Acceptance. Share common best practices and I would like to ask everyone to started supporting Universal Acceptance globally.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: I did want to take a short poll before we end the session. So just to see what ‑‑ how many of you identify yourselves as technical community? A couple. Civil society? Academic? Government? I think there's a few that are unaffiliated. So what did I miss? Private sector. Yeah. There we go. And how many of you use a non‑Latin character set issue primary script in your day‑to‑day life? One. That's good. So you see from the make up and the discussions, we have a lot of work to do including to reach out to the broader population that is more affected than the people in this room. It's really great to have all of you here and paying attention and engaged. So in addition to participating afterwards ICANN.org/acceptance, it's also blast the message out because we all need help. Those of us on the platform side with technical work in progress, we need to understand when you're hitting road blocks in your day‑to‑day use of products.
>> CHRISTIAN DAWSON: I want to thank everyone and Carolina and Jim for helping make it happen. Also all of you for being a part of this today. I appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
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This text is being provided in a roughly edited format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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