The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> JASMINE KO: Good afternoon. Is it working? Number two. Everyone, if you're joining us, please tune to channel number 2. Thank you for much ‑‑ am I audible? Okay. Great.
Okay. Ready? Okay. So hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning or evening from the other part of the world. So this is Jasmine Coe and welcome to our session inclusion. Our topic it's about ‑‑ we talk about the universal multilingual inclusions and universal acceptance for oral communities. This is NOI collaborative sessions. And I will be starting with a little bit introduction of the topic and then introducing our wonderful speakers here. And then there will be a guided discussion. And our floor will be open for the audience.
So to begin with the sessions, the universal access and digital inclusions that would be an open discussion from each speaker and accessibility across linguistic backgrounds and also some initial perspective, multilingual inclusion in a space to divide into different part of discussion we will be talking about the current landscape, the national and regional practices on multilingualism. Second we talk about the technical standards and the role of examining of role of technology standards and enable multilingual content. We also talk about the implementation strategies on the practical approaches on how to promote and implement the universal acceptance of diverse languages. We'll explore the role of these collaborative efforts between different stakeholders and may I now please introduce our speakers one by one.
I would love to introduce first Ms. Krislin Goulbourne‑Harry. She is UA Ambassador. Universal acceptance Ambassador. She's from the Caribbean digital transformation project. Then we have Ms. Dana Cramer. She is a candidate at Toronto University, Centre for International Governance and also with the center for international governance innovation, digital policy hub fellow, based in Canada. Then we have Mr. Tijani Ben Jemaa from the Mediterranean Federation Association, director and then also on site with us is Mr. Fahd Batayneh, Director and stakeholder of the Middle East ICANN. Finally, our online speaker Edmon Chung. Welcome.
Also, on the slide actually we have our online moderator Ms. Phyo Thiri Lwin from Myanmar youth IGF. Thank you for engaging our online speaker and participants as well. So let me just give the floor to the speaker on your open statement on this very important topic. I would love to have Mr. Tijani first, please.
>> TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Thank you, it was difficult to pronounce my name. No problem. Okay. Thank you very much, jasmine. As you know, the cultural diversity and access to information and knowledge for all people were among the 11 fundamental principles the Internet Society by the Information Society 2003, 2005.
Having a part of the Internet community struggling with original languages, not understood by machines and then the possibility for them to access any kind of content on the Internet in their mother tongue was a real concern for the WSIS. That's why the output of its first phase included two action lines related to this issue among a total of 11.
Line number 3, access to information and knowledge and action line number 8, cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content. Today, there are more five billion people connected to the Internet and at least one billion new users are expected to come online.
Most of the new users of the Internet live in countries where people speak and write languages other than English. Are there is a need to design inclusive resources and frameworks that would enable individuals of all ages, all cultures, all languages to fully participate in the digital space.
So Jasmine, that's why we are addressing today this issue ‑‑ this topic of multilanguage inclusion universal acceptance for all countries. Isn't it?
>> JASMINE KO: Yeah. Thank you very much. I don't want to keep pronouncing your name wrong. Thank you very much. Can I also pass it to Mr. At mans for your opening statement.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Thank you, Jasmine. Hopefully my voice is coming through fine. I'll keep speaking until you tell me that you can't hear me.
I think building on what Tijani is saying, I think this is a fundamental issue. For those of you who know me, this is a topic that I care about very much for the last 25 years. The work is not done yet. The way I see it is that digital inclusion needs to be the driver for universal acceptance and what we call a multilingual Internet which includes domain names in different languages.
To get us there over the hump, I think it is very clear that we have learned that just the Technical Community or just the registries or just the hosting platforms is not enough. This is what collaboration ‑‑ this is what multistakeholder collaboration means, and this is what we need for a truly multilingual and meaningful access and also universal acceptance. Because only together we can actually do this. The other thing about togetherness is I believe this cannot be a stand-alone thing. That's why it's connected to digital inclusion. It's connecting to the next billion of people that are coming online and also in terms of implementation because of the long tail nature of universal acceptance, it needs to have a roadmap.
It's not a switch it on tomorrow and then we're done technically kind of issue here. It's a long tail. You need to update your system one after the other. And all the systems, different parts of the systems have different places where email addresses and domain names are used. Therefore, it's a long tail thing.
So I think as over the 20 years, what I have learned is that in order to get us over the hump, this needs to be thought of as really like a movement. And I really, really believe that it's kind of like a social movement. We need the ground swell of grassroots support. But we also need those in power they also need to take a step. Therein lies what I call the language justice issue. In order for a multilingual Internet to really be realized, we need to think of it as a language justice issue. Because every time we talk about it, those who are already online actually many of them are already familiar with English, without the push for language justice in a movement kind of way, we can't get it over the hump. People need to understand, yes, we're going to have to give up a little bit, maybe even give up a little bit of efficiency for the longer tail for the next billion to feel comfortable to come online.
I think a part of the learning over the last 20 odd years is that this is not just a technical thing. This is something we need to do together in collaboration and needs to be movement about language justice.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you very much, Edmon, for your opening statement. Fahd, please.
>> FAHD BATAYNEH: Thank you for having me on this session. Since Edmon spoke about domain names, I'll try to divert a little bit from what Edmon just shared. Actually, I work for ICANN. ICANN is the Internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. The key thing we work on is really domain names and, of course, linguistic diversity is at the heart of today's domain name landscape. On the WSIS outcome document was released, linguistic diversity on the Internet was one of the key components.
So within ICANN we took upon our shoulders to at least ‑‑ since we are not into content, we did work on ensuring linguistic diversity when it comes to domain names. Of course, there was a lot of work within the ICANN community and within other organisations such as the Internet engineering task force on developing protocols and standards that could actually amend the domain name system so that it can understand non-ASCII domain names.
The unfortunate reality about ‑‑ well, okay. It's not an unfortunate reality, but when computer systems were first developed in the '70s and in the '80s, they only understood ASCII. When the domain name system was developed in the '80s, again, it only understood ASCII. In attempts to include non-ASCII characters, anything other than A to Z and 0 to 9, things need to be amended. Standards and protocols need to be amended so these systems can understand characters beyond ASCII.
Within ICANN and in close coordination and close cooperation with the ICANN community and the Internet community, IDNs are a reality today. You can actually register domain names in your native languages. But then, of course, as we tried to find the solution to something that was missing, we bumped into another issue, which is called universal acceptability or universal acceptance when it comes to domain names.
So the problem we faced is that ‑‑ we saw as an ICANN community is that not all software systems understand what is an Arabic domain name or what is a Chinese domain name. This is where there is a huge push at the moment within the ICANN ecosystem to make all systems understand what an Arabic domain name is what a Chinese domain name is. So what universal acceptance is trying to tackle is that all domain names and email addresses must be acceptable in all systems or in the domain name system. Thank you.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you very much. Now to Ms. Krislin please.
>> KRISLIN GOULBOURNE‑HARRY: Yes. Sorry. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me here. It's a beautiful city. I'm all the way from the Caribbean. It's a pleasure to be here. Linguistic diversity in the digital realm is not just important to preserve our cultural heritage, but it's also essential to empower communities to be able to freely express themselves fully in the digital realm. So when digital platforms and technology support multilingualism, it helps to bridge the communication gaps in academia, also innovation, and enables economic growth.
Now, in the Caribbean, by nature, we are a multilingual society, which means that at some point universal acceptance is critical for us. But where we are right now in the Caribbean, we haven't actually reached the point where we are having the conversation seriously, which is why these types of forums are important for us. We don't speak a lot of English and we realize that English is the primary language of the Internet as it relates to content. But if we look at the trends, we realize that this is actually going. At some point other languages, other characters, other scripts are becoming relevant, critical to be included and accepted in the software applications which is why UA, universal acceptance, is such an important topic that is rising right now, especially within the Caribbean region. Thank you.
>> DANA CRAMER: Can you all hear me. Great. Hello. Hello. Hello. It is. Sorry. I can't hear myself. That's kind of where the problem is arising. My apologies. It's always tough to go last in these introductory remarks, because everything you planned to say has always been said. I really like the way Edmon, that you had said language justice. Because I'm from Canada. We have it that reconciliation with our indigenous communities is a very strong topic in my country as a form of development and decolonisation efforts over all. One element of universal acceptance in my country is trying to resurrect indigenous languages over all, indigenous populations can grow with their linguistic capacity and reconnect with their past, their heritage and understanding and where the rest of the Canadians and those within colonial borders of Canada to be able to understand that there are multiple different words we have lost in describing our geography. We, however, as a country can't fully achieve that unless we have UA in Canadian in UCAS as the acronym for this. And it currently does not exist. It's working right now to try and have UA for indigenous populations in Canada. But not only in trying to get more people online and more languages represented online, it's also imperative to be able to have UA so that we have it ‑‑ the previous populations have been disenfranchised and have nearly been wiped away from their cultural way can resurrect that in a digital space, because we're stronger when we're all connected and all together. But we cannot achieve that unless we all have our capacity to speak online. Thank you.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you, Dana. Thank you all for your open statement. Now we're moving to discussion. The first part is about the current landscape.
So I would love to hear Fahd from your experience at ICANN engaging with the Middle East region, what unique challenges and successes that you have observed in implementing multilingual solution in the technical space.
>> FAHD BATAYNEH: Thanks, Jasmine. Let me say this as a story. And I usually like to share information really using stories. So ICANN was incorporated and established in 1998. Of course, right after ICANN's establishment and the organisation of the first public ICANN meetings, there was a lot of discussions within the community to expand the top‑level domain name space. Back then the world started with all the CCTLDs and a handful or two of GTLDs. The discussion within the ICANN community was to expand top level domains. This also included domain names or top-level domains in local languages.
Of course, it took the community awhile to work on the policy part of things. And then, of course, the technical side of things were mostly worked within the Internet engineering task force. Now in 2011 the first number of applications, the first group of applications for IDN top level domains or internationalised domain names was submitted to ICANN as part of the programme called the fast-track programme. In 2012 we see the first IDNTLDs in the root. Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries that launched their IDNTLD in Arabic. There was a huge hype around IDNs. But then, of course, when people started embracing it, we did bump into the situation where there was a lot of excitement before they were introduced but then it became less excitement. Registries did offer IDNs under ASCII top level domains. If you go to.com or.net you had the option of registering a domain name in your native language. For some languages that was okay. But for others it wasn't ‑‑ one example could probably be the Arabic language or the Arabic script, because in Arabic, we actually write from right to left. Whereas in English or in many of the Latin scripts we actually right from left to right, so that was an issue. If you wanted to type www and you switch your keyboard so you can write something in Arabic and switch back for the rest of the domain name. That was problematic.
As IDNs were launched and as we saw there wasn't much adoption for IDN domain names, there were many issues that the communities started looking into.
Now, if you come to the Arab region, one of the things we lack is actually local content. The unfortunate reality about the Arab region is probably that probably scientific, decent, good, Arabic content is probably less than 1% of the content is available online. If you look at the number of people who can speak the Arabic language, there are probably 800 million, 900 million, it's a really large number. Content is not the same percentage or same equivalence as the population.
Now, it's not (Audio breaking up) because you can consume content in English, maybe I can type a domain name in English. Then, of course, with the many universal acceptability issues ‑‑ (audio difficulty) there are issues with the mic.
Of course, universal acceptability was another issue. Even with these Arabic domain names, back in the early days, most of the web browsers, if not all, they didn't understand what an Arabic domain name is. Email systems didn't understand what's an Arabic ID. If you tried to create an Arabic ID, it doesn't go to the other end.
Of course, even when Arabic email systems were built, exchange of email IDs happened within that system. For example, in Saudi Arabia, they built the first Arabic email system. There are people in the room who actually worked on that from ‑‑ you could exchange emails within the system. But if you tried to send out emails to other systems, they would not understand this ID.
As you can see, while IDNs empowered communities, they came with a couple of problems. In universal acceptability of Arabic domain names or internationalised domain names is one of the projects at ICANN. There are people in the room who can tell you a story about how they tried to tackle this concept of universal acceptance from a normal ASCII top level domain name leave alone from an internationalised domain name. Stop here and hand it back over to you.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you very much. Now, across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean region, so this is a question for Krislin, how is the Caribbean region adjusting the language inclusion through the transformation project. What lessons can be shared with the other regions? To you, please.
>> KRISLIN GOULBOURNE‑HARRY: Okay. Thank you. So when I started, I mentioned that the Caribbean is a multilingual region. And we are currently going through a detailed transformation period. That involves a lot of stakeholder collaboration. We're working with academia. And there's a lot of public‑private partnership as well as regional and international partnerships as well. We do work alongside with ICANN and the USG growth as well as with ISOC.
Now, in terms of where we are, we have to understand that UA, universal acceptance, has never really been a major priority in the Caribbean, because at some point, because we are ‑‑ most of what we consume are already in the languages that we use. So it never really became a priority concern.
So we have to understand that where we are in the Caribbean is mainly sensitization where we're trying to bring the issue alive in the Caribbean and to start that debate.
What we have been doing is having, what we call, UA days which is partnering with the UASG to have the annual UA days within the different Caribbean islands. That has been going, which means a lot of sensitization has been happening. In addition to that, some countries are looking into starting adoption of universal acceptance, because while we ‑‑ sorry.
So we ‑‑ our languages, we have the regular languages, for example, English, French, Dutch, et cetera. But we also have native local languages, for example Creole and Patois. Those type of content are not available where persons in the Caribbean can consume them and appreciate them culturally. So that is also something that we have to work on when it comes to multilingualism and also acceptance in the Caribbean.
We haven't reached the point where we have started full implementation project. But what we have been doing is looking at other regions. We're doing a lot of sharing and collaboration to see where the persons are, what we can learn them and see what type of strategies we can implement within our own systems to get our content UA ready in terms of linguistics, et cetera. There are certain strategies we can look into. For example, the implementation of multilanguage interfaces that will be able to help us to naturally switch between languages, including our local languages.
And that and also, we are looking into the adoption of international standards to ensure that our applications can compete on that level globally and not just where we are right now. We're also encouraging our developers to use domain names in native languages such as Patois and Creole. There's a lot of education and awareness going on. But one thing we're also trying to champion is policy. So we need to ensure that some of the policies mandate that UA is important so that we can start to push it and drive it in the direction that ‑‑ so that we can communicate and participate globally the rest of the way.
>> JASMINE KO: Now to Dana. Based on your research and work with IGF Canada, what are some notable products for ensuring multilingual digital inclusion?
>> DANA CRAMER: Thank you very much. As I mentioned earlier, UA isn't just about trying to get certain populations online. It's also reconciliation with populations who are also losing their own linguistic identities, for instance, and trying to make sure that we have languages kept and captured, so that they can grow.
One area with that, however is the importance of meaningful inclusion of those population groups. So when we're looking at UA and the bottom‑up processes at ICANN, working groups will form. There's one right now that includes having UCAS to be involved in domains. But one element is that Indigenous Peoples might not actually fully realize that this is happening. That kind of becomes a top-down approach for them.
So where you have this, for example, initiative that can be reconciling without including those groups specifically, you're not meaningfully bringing them to the table and ensuring that they will then have the knowledge, the capabilities to be able to start including these. So one area that we have to look at, for example, in Canada is engagement, making sure there's recognition amongst indigenous communities about what ICANN is, for instance. I also coordinate a youth NRI, and we've been doing this quite a bit to try to bring a bit more promotional elements about UCAS hopefully going online soon with indigenous groups. So that when this happens, we can hit the ground running in that. Another kind of mention I want to have. In Canada we speak English and French.
In French sometimes for population groups you will include accents on certain letters whereas others you don't. In all honesty, when I'm typing in French, I don't always wait for the accent to come up. I want to quickly get the email sent off. That's normal in Canada. We don't always include accents on letter. When you have an accent on a letter like an E to spell Québec, one of our provinces we need that interchangeability for accents we recognise as well as single letters because they're used interchangeably by the population on the ground.
Finally, I want to expand this multilingual inclusion with emerging technology, specifically artificial intelligence, and talk about a community that I don't think always gets the recognition in these conversations which is accessibility seeking communities or the disability community, specifically those who are deaf, for instance.
When deaf communities speak, sign language is prominently use and there's shortening of a sentence in order to get the language expressed. This isn't always the case. For example, if I were to sign in American sign language which we use in Canada I will say my name is Dana, so I spell out each letter. However, for different types of words like when it's topical for this conference, for instance, I really need to use the toilet, you just do this. Just a quick T. Not express an entire sentence. When we have emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, an artificial intelligence programme for Generative AI, there's not always a recognition that certain communities, standards and protocols and technologies are built will need words and letters skipped out. I wanted to include that multilingual is not always about the spoken word or the written word, it's also about the signed word and what is included in the sentence to ensure it's accessible for everyone using it.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you Dana. We've been sharing Caribbean and North America. Moving on to more technical discussion, the role of technical standards and protocols, the question I have for Edmon, from your perspective in Asia Pacific and what do you see as the critical technical standards needed to ensure the true multilingual inclusions in domain names and digital service?
>> EDMON CHUNG: Thank you. That's an interesting question. But I think I wanted to build off what Fad said in terms of basic domain names and different languages that is ready. One of the things that relates to what day that was saying is that there are policies that need to be in place for what we call variants. So very early on when we start looking at different languages, we realized that, for example, in English your domain name, whether you capitalise or use a small letter, it actually is the same thing.
But if you play with words, you would figure out that you can capitalise different ones and come up with different words with the same set of letters. Think about it that way, and you realize that sometimes these same strings that people, users might get confused with needs to be registered together.
Whereas in the technology itself there are two different strings or two different domains. We need policies that map them back together. And that's what we call IDN variants or variant domains. That addresses some of the issues that Dana was talking about. I think this is one of the things ‑‑ to make it native and make it fully acceptable including into universal acceptance, that is one of the challenges, I think.
Coming back to what I said earlier, this is going to be a long tail situation. And that's why one of the main push from both the ICANN community and, of course, what Dot Asia we're trying to push for is for different companies to come up with a roadmap. None of us can solve it on our own. And also, none of us can solve this issue immediately tomorrow.
So drawing out a roadmap is going to be actually one of the most important things. I think when you think about a world map, it comes back to what I touched on the language just this issue. But when you think about real adoption one of the important things we also need to remember is ‑‑ I think it was Dana that mentioned this as well, we need to bring those who are affected into the solution.
The problem ‑‑ those who are already online are probably a little bit more familiar with English and can deal with this. It is those that are not already online or those that are very new online. And one of the things about multilingual Internet is that if you don't realize it, multilingual Internet actually makes for a safer Internet for most people.
One of the things I like to use as an example is like my dad who is getting online now and asking me about phishing and all these issues. The first thing or any cybersecurity expert will tell you need to look at the email and the domain or URL you're trying to click into. This is the number one thing that any cybersecurity will talk about in terms of cybersecurity for those who are just coming online.
And with domain names and email addresses in the language that they know, then their trusted services can actually send information to them in their language with the domain names and email addresses in the languages that they can be familiar with, because a string of English characters means nothing to them. So a slight difference is very easy to miss. But if it is presented in the local language, that is why a multilingual Internet actually makes for a safer Internet for more people, especially that is coming online.
I think these are some of the things that needs to be in place when we think about it. Finally, before I close off, I think we also need to try to get them early. In order for the next generation of people to really think ‑‑ I always think that universal acceptance is successful when one generation starts to think about why was multilingual domain names not available in the first place? That's the right question.
If we get to that world, we're done. We're not there yet. So we want to get them early. We need to have IDNs. We need to have multilingual domain names and email addresses. When people first people learn about networking, when they first learn about DNS in high school or first year of university, when they first learn about networking, they need to know this. These are some of the technical challenges. How do we get it into the curriculum? How do we make people understand that cybersecurity and multilingual Internet makes for a safer Internet? How do we implement the variants into the hosting platforms into the different technology platforms with a roadmap in place? I think these are the technical challenges that are still in front of us.
But I think there are standards and universal acceptance work that is being done. But we need people to realize a roadmap and push forward with it.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you very much, Edmon. Now to Tijani also about the technical question about ‑‑ because you have very experience in the Internet associations. How have the technical standards and protocols for multilingual support evolved so far?
>> TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Thank you, Jasmine. Before I answer your question, let me draw your attention on the fact that we are speaking about universal acceptance. We're lucky to have in this room sitting in the second row here, the man who invented this concept. Thank you. As everyone knows, informatics started with the American standard for information and interchange, the ASCII. It is a standard encoding 128 characters only. And it is only for one script, one language.
The ASCII was extended to 256 to cover the letters with accents that are used in the Europe languages. In 1988 (Audio breaking up) the coding system ‑‑ the Unicode is a text encoding standard created and maintained (Audio breaking up) that can be digitised. The Unicode was (Audio breaking up) version 16.0 defines 154,998 characters, 168 scripts. So please notice from where we came and where we are today. It came from 128 characters for one single language, one single script to today, almost 155,000 characters for 168 scripts. And each script may cover more than one language, as you know. (Audio difficulty)
Can you hear me now? Thank you. So please also know that the Unicode is ultimately able to encode more than 1.1 million characters. As you see thanks to the Unicode standard even before the Internet was up for public use. Here I wanted to make a difference between the multilingual content and the multilingual email addresses and domain names. The content was before people. Before it was made possible for us to use.
The issue of multilingual inclusion in the Internet space doesn't then concern the content but how to reach this content in other scripts than the ASCII? The domain name system, the DNS, was originally designed to accept only ASCII characters.
By the years, the necessity to have other scripts understood by the DNS became (?) the internationalised domain names everyone spoke about before me was created to solve this issue, not by challenging the DNS infrastructure to accept any script but by creating an interface that translates the ASCII ‑‑ to translate the original script to ASCII code to be understood by the DNS, and then the ASCII to be understood for the user is also translated. So this is the way that the other scripts were accepted by the DNS. In October 2009, icon approved the IDN and begun to implement it in 2018 through the ccTLD infrastructure that he spoke about.
The universal acceptance now is technical necessity to ensure all domain names and email addresses, regardless of their script, their language or their character length, can be equally accepted, validated, stored, processed, and displayed correctly and consistently by all Internet enabled applications, devices, and systems.
The universal acceptance is considered as a fundamental requirement for the continued expansion of the Internet. Thank you.
>> JASMINE KO: Thank you for that Tijani for sharing your experience. We have been talking about the technical protocols and standards. Moving on we'll be talking about implementation strategies. At the same time, I would love to address my co‑moderator to continue the facilitation with you all from IGF. To you.
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Thank you so much. I'm sorry everyone, I was running late in one of the Parliamentary Track sessions. Better late than ever. I would like to pose my next question to Mr. Fahd. How is ICANN supporting the implementation of the multilingual emerging digital markets from your experience?
>> FAHD BATAYNEH: Any better? All right. Thanks for your question. So as I explained earlier, at ICANN our contribution to the digital ecosystem and all this digital transformation is really through domain names, whether in ASCII or even in local languages. Internationalised domain names are a really big part of our work.
Much of the work has been done, probably ‑‑ there is still to be done. We never close the door on anything. Of course, when I say we, it's really the ICANN community. So ICANN, the organisation, facilitates these processes. But it's really within the community where all the work happens, the registries, the registrars, even the registrants through the different constituencies at ICANN, and even the Internet engineering task force where the technical side of things, the protocols, the standards are developed.
Now, again as I mentioned in my previous intervention and some of my colleagues on this panel mentioned, universal acceptance of these ‑‑ universal acceptance remains a key challenge. In order for us to use all domain names and all email systems and all systems, we really need to push this whole concept of universal acceptance. We need the systems to actually understand whether this is a real domain name or not. When I write a domain name in Arabic, is it real or some kind of a fake ID?
Just to maybe give you a little bit of an imagination of what do we mean by universal acceptance? Let's say you're trying to open a bank account. And maybe it asks you for a user name and a password. Now, for some banks, for example, they would ask you for an email ID. So you just enterer your email ID as a user name and enter your password. If I try to enter an Arabic email ID, would the system at the bank accept that. If I try to enter a password in Arabic, would the bank system understand that?
In many cases you can expect that the system won't understand that. This is why universal acceptance kicks in. This is actually just one scenario. But I felt that maybe giving you an example of what we are talking about here is worth it. There is work under way at ICANN within a steering group called universal acceptance steering group. We do have members here in the room on the USAG. It's a collective work. It's not ICANN working on it alone or just the registries working on it alone. It's everybody who has something on the Internet that universal acceptance can have some kind of effect or impact on. You find Microsoft or Google or meta or reg extras, Go Daddy actually contributing to the USAG, it's a collective effort. It's not something you find a solution to on the effort. A lot of effort is going on. Much has been covered. More is yet to be covered.
>> DUAA ABALAWI: Brilliant, thank you so much, Mr. Fahd. Being mindful of time I will direct the rest of the questions to the panelists if we can leave the responses to one minute or a minute and a half so we can have the opportunity to take some intervention franchise the floor.
So Ms. Krislin, I would like to pose this next question to you on some strategies that the Caribbean region in specific has implemented multilingual services and what were the key risk factors in that regard?
>> KRISLIN GOULBOURNE‑HARRY: Thank you for that question. In the Caribbean we haven't really dived into adoption as yet. We are still in the learning process when it comes to universal acceptance. Particularly we are also embracing the fact that we are multilingual to the point where there are some Caribbean islands who have started to become islands that speak multiple languages.
So we are still in the baby stages. We're learning from others who have done it before. And we're also following the trends. For example, when we do or UA or what we would ask persons to do is to check if their websites are UA ready.
There are tools available. For example, on the USAG website you can use to test whether or not your website is UA ready. Once we have discovered that certain systems, maybe their email address is not ‑‑ their email address is not accepting UA emails, we'll try to look at ways that we can partner with maybe ISOC or other bodies to help us to guide our developers into making our systems, preparing them on making them UA ready.
But one of the challenges that we're having is while the technology is there and available, we have issues with marginalised regions, for example, and infrastructure divides. That is something we're also tackling as we're preparing for the global market.
So, we also have another challenge, which is device being available to persons so that they can actually utilize the systems that are available. So in the Caribbean right now, while we are in the phase of stakeholder engagement, we're driving public awareness as well, and we're trying to basically move into adoption. But we have not reached a point where it is critical on our agenda, which is why we are increasing the conversations. Maybe at some point we will be taking it to the policy level where maybe public websites will be mandated to be UA ready in order to facilitate certain types of training.
For example, as we open up ‑‑ I'm taking a little long. As we open up to the global market, we do track a lot of tourism oftentimes, persons will be required to register on a hotel's website using their email addresses. And they often, persons who are coming into the Caribbean are not necessarily ASCII character users which means they may need to create an email address that is written in ASCII characters in order to register or book a hotel room in the Caribbean. So that is one challenge.
So it does create a barrier. And we are realizing that now, which is why the talk has been increasing, and we are getting there. Thank you.
>> DUAA ABALAWI: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Krislin. I think you touched on quite a lot of important points and a lot of challenges that emerging countries are currently facing which takes me to my next question. Ms. Dana, what have you observed that promote linguistic diversity in digital spaces. I would ask you to keep it to a minute and a half, that would be great.
>> DANA CRAMER: For the sake of time, I think a lot of policies have already been spoken about through the panel. But one that I will note on is policies that can ‑‑ when we want to have policy innovation, in addition to talking about domains and websites and email, we need to talk about platforms. For example, how many of you online and in person sent a slew of emails today versus how many WhatsApp messages did you send? And trying to make sure we have multiple languages in WhatsApp, in different communication platforms and applications. And as new emerging technologies come through, how that can be utilized. That's especially important as well for next generation for youth who might not be as prominent email users, because technologies are developed with new users in mind and geared toward more younger people.
When we start to talk about engagement and policy approaches, for example, in having these discussions about UA, IDNs, et cetera, how we can also extend this to emerging technologies in different capacities. Thank you.
>> DUAA ABALAWI: Thank you so much, Dana. I'm going to move on very quickly to Mr. Edmon who is online today. If you could share some experience dot Asia and IDNs and making them a natural part of our ecosystem.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Thank you for the question. I guess in terms of trying to make it a natural part of the system, it really goes back to the word integrated as I started with. Both the technology and how we think about it needs to be integrated rather than isolated. So it feels like it's part of the ecosystem already. Building on what day that said, people say, people don't use email addresses or domain names anymore. I still see lots of domain name domain names being sent in WhatsApp messages. Part of integrated sign, the linking, making sure in WhatsApp messages the links, the different domain names get linkified probably on WhatsApp or signal or any other chat message platform. That's part of integration. That's the kind of integration that I'm talking about.
It needs to be integrated and not an add‑on. It should feel like it's native to that platform itself. That's how we make the multilingual Internet into not any more a second-class citizen. That's an important part.
Integration goes into a few other things as well, integrating into what I mentioned earlier, networking 101 curriculum, high school, university education, integrating it into government procurement processes. That's part of the policy, for example. If government procurement processes require IT systems to be universal acceptance ready, to be multilingual embracing, then we will see that happen.
So, again, integrating it into digital inclusion, integrating it into development initiatives even, Asian Development Bank work, Belton Road Initiative from China, all this development work it should integrate the multilingual Internet into it natively. I think that's going to make the difference.
>> DUAA ABALAWI: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Mr. Edmon. I believe you ended on a brilliant note for us to transition to our open floor discussion. So we did want to discuss or touch on multistakeholder collaboration today. So if you have any questions that you would like to bring to the floor on the role of collaborative efforts between stakeholders and advancing digital inclusion, do feel free to bring those to the table.
So if we can just hand the gentleman in the back a microphone.
(No audio.)
They need to hire more people. Users will also need to ‑‑ if they're not used to collaborate application in their own language, they will probably require service support in their own language. So it will need some extra services provided by the platform. So this is my question. What are the challenges that universal acceptance brings?
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: I saw you nodding there. Maybe you can take this question.
>> FAHD BATAYNEH: Thanks for the question. So universal ‑‑ solving the issue of universal acceptance is not something that will happen in a day or a week or a month or even in a year. It's not something that will happen through one player or several players. It's the collective effort of everyone who has something on the Internet, whether it's an internationalised domain name or even systems that actually (Audio breaking up). Now in an optimal world, we need to reach to each and every one of these entities. But in reality, that's really not the case. So you can't go and knock on everybody's door and say, well, you actually have some systems that you may want to reconfigure so that they become universally acceptable.
The thing is that even when you go and knock on people's doors, they might tell you ‑‑ this was actually the issue in the early days. So in the early days there's this thing called universal acceptance, they're like, well, who cares. Because back then it was mostly language dominated.
If you look at statistics, for example, when the WSIS 2005, I think 95% of content was English and 90% of users were English native speakers. Today the numbers are completely different.
The things have changed. When you talk about bringing in the next billion Internet users it's mostly from Asia and Africa, these are non‑English country speakers.
To summarize, the problem of universal acceptance is a very long journey. It has already started. The community has done a really good job in pushing things forward. But there's much, more to be done really.
(No audio).
>> EDMON CHUNG: If you're asking me a question ‑‑
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Can you hear me now? Brilliant. You can hear me. There's some sort of feedback in the back.
>> Check.
(Background talking).
>> TECHNICIAN: They heard the check. The caption is what I'm saying. They're hearing. This is working.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Zoom whoever is saying check.
>> What's the channel? What is it?
>> AUDIENCE: I want to add something to reply to my colleague here. Yeah, I am sure that universal acceptance is ethical issue. But at the same time, it's traditional issue. Why it is traditional issue is that your technical developer, your developers ‑‑ (no audio) ‑‑ to be updated in order to handle such kind of email addresses in Unicode. I want to add something also as well that universal acceptance is not only for IDNs or AIs but also for the domain names. At the same time the number of domain name registrations may be two or three times the number of registrations for GTLDs, whatever is legacy or new. So the origin of universal acceptance should start from organisation CTLD. Thank you.
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Thank you so much. Tech team, can you give me a thumbs‑up if our online participants can hear us? All right. Great. So Mr. Edmon, I want to give the floor to you. We cannot see you but I can assure you we can hear you.
>> EDMON CHUNG: I probably missed many of the questions and I caught part of it. So I agree very much. And that's why I think the new generation of developers need to know this natively. IDN email addresses in different languages should be part of the basic network 101 and not an add‑on. Same with platforms.
As you mentioned, it's not just about the different languages. It's also about GTLDs and how the Internet itself expands. Multilingual is one aspect of it. Our Internet needs to learn that domain names and email protocols could upgrade. And that requires network engineers and software developers to be aware of this quite natively and be aware of it and kind of implement it by design.
Again, UA and IDN by design.
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Thank you so much for your comments, Edmon. I would just like to call on our online moderator to see if we have any questions in the chat that you would like to pose.
>> PHYO THIRI LWIN: There is no question on the chat. But there is some comment from in the beginning she mentioned about the Caribbean citizens may speak other languages but the accepted language is English. Our goal in the Caribbean English is spoken despite Spanish, Dutch and country language. Also, French, Spanish, Dutch, official language but English is spoken and accepted. I speak from the experience having trouble to most activity Caribbean islands most of my life. There's another comment from the Paris as well. Language in the Caribbean and university. I study French and Spanish at school in the '60s. That's now all we're receiving.
Let me pass it back to on-site moderator.
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Thank you so much. I think there were a couple of comments on the Caribbean. Ms. Krislin, I want to see if maybe you have any comments or feedback on those statements?
>> KRISLIN GOULBOURNE‑HARRY: So in the Caribbean it is correct we are multilingual. I agree with the commenter that says that we study multiple languages from even secondary, primary school levels, because that is just the nature of the Caribbean. We are multilingual nation. Just to finalise, when we think of our content and we're trying to include different languages and also include our native languages, our Creole and Patois, we would have to consider engage linguistic experts to ensure the content is actually correct and also relevant, but not only that, we would have to engage the community. Because ‑‑ our dialect is not necessarily something that can be interpreted by a regular linguistic expert, and it also comes with a lot of cultural aspects as well, which needs to ‑‑ we need to make sure that the content that is out there is not only correct, but it is also relevant and it is a correct representation of who we are as a Caribbean nation. Thank you.
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Thank you so much for that, Krislin. Audience, we are nearing the end of our session. We have six minutes left. I would really like to call on our panelists here today to give us 30 seconds for your closing statements, and then we can depart.
>> KRISLIN GOULBOURNE‑HARRY: Thank you. Yes. It is critical that we embrace and accept the fact that universal acceptance is relevant to our community, whether or not we are aware of it, it is becoming a critical issue.
In the Caribbean we are not going to sit and wait for it to come knocking on our doors. We are preparing ourselves. We are engaging. We are promoting, building awareness, and we are partnering with different bodies, the different international bodies, including other Caribbean islands as well to ensure that we are ‑‑ we will (Audio breaking up) and to ‑‑ in the digital realm by embracing multilingualism and also accepting and adopting, implementing universal acceptance. Thank you.
>> DANA CRAMER: My closing remark has to do with the importance of engaging communities and bringing communities along to universal acceptance initiatives to ensure that communities that are affected need to be part of the conversation and part of the implementation as well. So that we can truly have a bottom‑up approach instead of top down in any of the components along that timeline of implementation. Thank you.
>> TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Thank you. Now that we have solved the technical problems, now that the machines can support all scripts, now that Dana's can accept all the scripts also through the solutions that we found for them, now that all these scripts can be accepted by all devices and applications on the Internet, do we have multilingual Internet? I know that the short answer is no. But even the longer answer is no.
By now have almost by 2024, we have almost 50% of the Internet content in English. I think this is a failure. We didn't manage to make Internet multilingual despite the considerable effort that was made to make all these technical issues solved.
So I think that the problem is in the use of the Internet. You may have an Internet that accepts all scripts. But if you don't put content in those scripts, you won't make the Internet multilingual. The main thing we have to do is make our committees to produce local content and local languages. Thank you.
>> FAHD BATAYNEH: Thank you. So I would like to echo what day that said about engagement. And I would also like to add to the fact that universal acceptance is really a collective effort. Everybody has a say in it. Everybody has to be involved in it. Governments can play a really key role in actually developing policies and promoting policies that ensure that systems actually are multilingual so they understand what characters are beyond the traditional ASCII.
I also think end users have a very big role here. So rather than trying to communicate and consume content maybe in English, try to start promoting your own language, your own content. Because that's really the way to make the Internet ‑‑ that's one of the ways at least ‑‑ to make the Internet really multilingual. Thank you.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Should I go ahead?
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Over to you, Edmon.
>> EDMON CHUNG: So I guess I'll just highlight I think that I do believe that the multilingual Internet and meaningful connectivity, which means localized content as well as services comes hand in hand. Some people say we don't use the DNS and domain names and email anymore. Maybe we useless of them, but I think it is the foundation for a multilingual Internet.
I'll give you this little piece of information or history trivia. The DNS itself, the English DNS was put in place in 1983. Six years later that was when the web was born, 1989. So all the infrastructure, email, DNS, English, was ready when the web came and created a lot of content that was English driven. As Tijani mentioned, even today almost 60% of the web's language is in English. I think the foundation technologies like domain names and email addresses needs to be internationalised for meaningful access, for meaningful local services and local language content to be expressed and developed.
To close, I guess as I repeat just two things if you may remember, to address the issue, I think we need collaboration and integration. Collaboration among different stakeholders, technical, cybersecurity, content and services, including, as Dana mentioned, those who are most affected by the issue in the development of the solution.
And then integration, not only technology, UA and IDN by design but policy integration, education, development initiatives. That's the collaboration and integration is going to be critical for us to really build a multilingual Internet. Finally, we have to make it a movement. In order for it to be a movement, we need to get grassroots involved, as Dana mentioned and as I mentioned to get users involved to get those most affected to have the understanding that this will make a difference for them as well.
>> DUAA ALBALAWI: Thank you so much, Edmon. Thank you so much to our panelists. If I can urge everyone for a round of applause to our panelists here today. Thank you so much for your very insightful contributions. Thank you so much to our online attendees and of course one final thank you to my co‑moderators who helped put this together. Thank you, guys, so much. I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening.