UNESCO’s involvement with IDNs

Great to see the important of IDNs recognized by a major international body, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and their work towards the successful planning, implementation, and bringing awareness of them. In the following post: ICANN approves the introduction of internationalized domain names, UNESCO discuss their involvement to date with IDNs and plans for future cooperation with ICANN.

The board endorsed the IDNC Working Group Report on recommendations for the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names, to expand the world’s Domain Name System and to work on adapting it to accommodate Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) in scripts other than Latin, such as Arabic, Cyrillic or Devanagri, and ideographic writing systems, such as Japanese, Korean or Chinese.

This process is a major improvement in the development of the Internet as a global information and communication tool as it will enable multi-script addressing and therefore ensure access to millions of users who are currently deprived of this core resource of Knowledge Societies due to language constrictions.

UNESCO’s contribution
Ensuring a multilingual cyberspace is part of the organization’s mandate of promoting linguistic and cultural diversity. In January 2008 UNESCO joined the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN with an observer status and participated at the GAC’s work for the preparation of the IDNC WG Report.

In particular UNESCO offered its capacity in providing linguistic expertise, raising awareness in those countries that use a non-Latin script(s) and building capacity in Member States.

The way forward
Further to UNESCO’s contribution through the GAC to the IDNs process, UNESCO conducted direct information meetings with ICANN executive staff to explore possible future collaborations between the two organizations. These might include agreements in the framework of concrete projects or the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to ensure that all linguistic and cultural communities have their presence in the Internet.

UNESCO’s role in the development of a long term strategy for the implementation of Internationalized Domain Names requires a full engagement toward the next ICANN meeting, November 2008 in Cairo and political advocacy for the third IGF in Hyderabad.

Following the launch of this process in Paris, it is important that UNESCO brings its input in the upcoming months when the long term policy will be discussed and adopted. Furthermore, the Cairo meeting will be an occasion to involve the UNESCO Cairo Office and enhance its coordination with the headquarters, contributing to the multi-stakeholder regional project of Arabization of Domain Names under UNESCWA.