IGF 2019 – Day 3 – Raum III – WS #216 Online Identity in the Multilingual Domain Name Space

>> MODERATOR: Okay. Hello, everybody. Let me get started. For those who are not staying for the session, you are welcome to stay, absolutely. And if you're here nor the session, I welcome you to sit down. Great, fantastic, thank you. Good.

So, I oversee strategy and strategic initiatives. This panel is on Universal acceptance and challenges in its significance. It builds on some other conversations that have been occurring around Universal acceptance. There was a session yesterday. And we appreciate that there's also many other conversations in sessions around the topic at this meeting here.

Before we go to the panel, just some words around Universal acceptance, less familiar with it. What it means is all domain names and e-mail addresses work in all software application, that is that the applications are able to accept, validate, process, store, and display all domain names and e-mail addresses. It's a very important area of work to provide it to end users. And so, as the internet expands into different languages and globally, this is a really fundamentally important area of work that needs to be addressed in order to ensure that everybody can converse in their local languages and have everything resolved very well.

From ICANN's perspective, we've realized this is a fundamental insignificant issue and there are still challenges that need to be addressed and with that have also made sure this top sick part of the upcoming new strategic plan for the period of 2021 through 2025, namely the unique identifier systems with the strategic goal to foster competition, consumer choice, and innovation in the internet space by increasing awareness and encouraging readiness for Universal acceptance, idea, and implementation in IPv6, so this is a priority area for the organization building in to our operating plan.

With that, there's been a lot of work in the community.

I'd like to go to work with our panelists and open it up for questions. Start out with Dr. Data who is remote. The chair of the Universal acceptance steering group, and we're going ask him to explain some of the issues around this more specifically. I will then go to Leon Sanchez and ask him to share the vision on the ICANN board on some of the issues. I will turn to Manal on my right, the chair of the government advisory committee and here as her capacity as a policy maker in Egypt and part of the Egyptian government and ask her to talk about a few of the issues that governments have identified. Lastly, I will turn to Nick Smith to my left part of the dynamic coalition on the DNS initiative and ask him to talk a little bit about that.

With that, do we have Dr. Data on the phone for the remote?

>> Dr. Data: I'm here. I hope you can hear me. I'm coming all the way from India. I hope you can hear me? I can't hear the response back?

>> MODERATOR: Yes, we can hear you very well.

>> Dr. Data: Let me start by saying Universal acceptance has a very big vision for promoting so that all domain names and all -- are fully in all of the software applications. It sounds simple. It is a problem right now. And while most all applications which we use in today's life.

The mission is to mobilize the developer to get it ready by providing documentation, case studies, and tools so that they can modify their application s to be ready and engage in the experience and much more --

Large as it has been -- to promote, improve competition, and more importantly, break down language barriers of people.

Universal acceptance has a small scope around the domain names and e-mail addresses. The new -- domain name which means we had an original dot-com, dot.net, now we can have -- so this is all applications well enough and they should not be? If someone on the domain name on Skype, for example, it should be considered as --? -- and the block the original names, it's a UA issue.

Top level domain names, which means now a person can have a top-level domain name of 64 characters like dot-com, dot content, dot professional, dot economy, like in the U.S., dot.net. --? -- the domain names, which means the domain name -- and Arabic domain name in India, we have 15 language domain names. See those are the IDN, the corrector --

And the fourth thing is domain name which is an e-mail address -- which means when we talk about IDNs, we have an e-mail ID on that and these will be completely in non- English and all -- the and that will be known as e-mail address? -- these are four that we promote and tell people these are the domain names coming out of these top level domain name s and all IDNs must be handled equally.

So how do we see it's -- ready or not. So, let's say you all came to the IDN. And I'm sure you also -- as a visitor or a restaurant and you used your e-mail address which was -- and you -- your e-mail address. If it allows you to accept it as -- the first we ask -- that -- was created out of this scope that I just thought should be accepted. So, we must remember that the first word is accept, the website and the software must accept these IDNs and the applications.

Second is validate. So, if the e-mail address is -- it must validate. As a validate ID. Then suggest it will leave as a -- IDN.

Third is to restore. If you tie the Email ID -- information in it -- it must restore it -- and then process it well, which means it should be processed to send you a welcome, send you a link, information, whatever is required. That e-mail IDN should be accepted, validated, and then processed so that the one of the -- is done perfectly.

And then to display that -- so I'm -- affect, store, process, and display. These are the five steps that are required in the software to be UA ready. All domain names and e-mail IDs and they'll be provided by anybody, doesn't matter, must be an available domain name as -- and the valid e-mail ID and the valid E mail ID in this area.

Just to give you -- while I'm chair, we have three vice chairs in our admin group which are Verisign and Mark is based out of Australia. We run the leadership with large -- when we -- plan to outsource the -- and now we have full action plans. We have summed up together in six of them. The technology enabler. These people who enable technology like the standard maker maybe ideas, maybe the framework like java and dot-net, anybody who's enabled the technology, these people come under the category. We go and influence them so that they've made all of the technologies UA ready and they enable there. Technology is the -- and tell them about technology which you're developing to with be a mobile -- maybe a software and you are making it UA ready software.

So once the framework is UA ready, then obviously you are expecting the world to be better than it is today with a domain name enabler.

E-mail software and provider. So, this is divided to two. So, e-mail software provider for on-line -- these people who are building the hotmail for e-mail service providers. These people need to be UA ready and -- open source.

And Google, Microsoft, and who provides services. So, this needs to be UA ready. So, we have targets. Into the software so they accept the e-mail -- and the e-mail coming from an IBN e-mail address. It's important to note and tell you here that Microsoft and Google both have made their software and e-mail platforms UA ready to an extent that you can send an e-mail to Google framework or Google -- on a -- and get a reply from -- this much they have enabled. It's a --

Influencing individuals and -- that is one of the reasons we're talking to you today, because we know that -- influential. You can -- when you go back to the community, you can tell people that you had to have software. You have to be UA ready. And that's coming in. Once I type in my Email ID, one example for you to go back and see whether it's going to be useful in your software as well as the e-mail ID and send me an e-mail to my system, all of those things are going to be on the e-mail ID. And the policy makers. The policy makers who are producing software for -- that is to be -- this will be UA ready. Which means that the software which government -- if I have -- I have a Hindi e-mail ID, can I use that to communicate without any rejection? These are -- strategic plan are being targeted with the stake holder. For the sake of -- because of -- then the enabler, technology developer, e-mail software provider, e-mail service provider, influential individuals and government policy makers.These are the people we are targeting.

We started working with -- really large volunteers. And we are volunteers. We are now 500 plus volunteers to -- this is probably the largest group when we do not get anybody. We want to do it -- this is the whole global world problem. It cannot just solve the problem there in the -- so there are working groups which are technology working groups which focuses on technology, plans, coordinates, and oversees the standard and some practices implement them for tools so that -- and so anybody who needs support on technology, you can support that. And it's -- the second is e-mail working group, e-mail address -- to plan, execute, and engage with the service provider and software providers to make them UA ready. Measurement working group, plan and -- one is the UA readiness. Apart of what we're doing, is it really working? And we also measure what we near the process of -- and some applications -- that can make them UA ready by making them UA readiness. How far we are and make this -- local initiative. We obviously don't know the whole -- how they work. So we depend on the local community there people can get together and what is required to promote -- and the community -- bringing them together, support them with the technology and the document, so that they can go back to the local -- and readiness.

We have already a local initiative in India. We have from -- from China. We are from I think CIS. We're moving in that direction, global many initiatives so it's much greater, much more -- much deeper than what we have right now sitting here at this location.

And last, the UN ambassadors. And I would like to also leave a message here after this. UN ambassador is a -- the individual who is an influencer who believes in the UA initiative and the -- initiative in the local community. If you have more people, who will be a good turnout of your community, out of -- if you are from ICANN, or anybody from IGF, we would be really happy to talk with -- and see that we are -- globally. We need more and more who can take this initiative further. We have many organizations that are supporting us globally. So how can you help? That's the important thing that I would like to leave.

So, can you take our message to the people who you know around who serves large audiences, who are -- services, can they be -- can you influence -- can you connect with us and take that message? Can you be -- who takes the message forward and the UN in the region.

Another thing you can do, can you identify when you are modifying your software, how soon you are buying new software, can you ensure that when you buy a new software or when you're modifying the software, you can use the -- in your own organization.

It will be -- on-line with a different ID. So, you'll be able to be with a large customer base which is going to come. And we just -- a small benefit for you, we are looking for case studies who have taken an approach who have -- so that we can -- and motivate more people and give you a global awareness about a company by the initiative of the public at large. We hope this is helpful. I'm staying around. Sorry I could not join you there. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very, very much. That was a useful, comprehensive overview, not only of what the issue is in our -- in the categories around acceptance, validating, and obviously the processing and some of the challenges, but also the need to create awareness around this.

Leon, can I turn to you to talk a little bit about ICANN in the board's perspective on this.

>> LEON SANCHEZ: Leon Sanchez, ICANN board. I think it's on top of the board's mind and priorities. We involve the systems to serve the needs of the global internet user base. Within this strategic objective, we have formulated strategic goal 3.1, which is to, of course, the Universal acceptance ID by increasing awareness to enable more end users to use the internet. Because we see these as an issue that goes to the core of inclusivity and to the core of the spirit of the internet, right? So, many of us are multilingual, many of us have different scripts in use. And this goes to the identity that we actually use as internet users.

So, as I said, I -- I believe this is a top priority for -- for the board. And it has also established a working group on the main Universal acceptance. The member of that working group. And I believe I have other board members joining us today. But I can tell you some of the membership of this working group is Manal Ismail, and Kaveh. So, you see, there are many board members working on this. And some of the objectives that this working group has is to, of course, enable the organization to better support the community in discussing and advancing these very important subjects.

As you might be aware within the community, there is an acceptance group since 2015. And it has produced a wide variety of materials that are being published and made available for those interested in consuming those to actual access them. So, I think that Dr. Data said a lot of things that I want to say. But the general acceptance steering group has the plan and they are targeting different actors within the internet system to create awareness about Universal acceptance and the importance there of and they're looking at technology enablers, technology developers, e-mail software and service providers influencing individuals and organizations that are active in this sphere and also try to be of capacities and to create awareness within government policy makers. I've been the beneficiary of Universal myself and also a victim of some students that are not universally accepting e-mail addresses, for example, right? So, my personal e-mail address is a don ma Max address. Sometimes I put it in the form in some systems, it will tell me it's not a valid e-mail, right? It's not configured to accept the data Max extension as a valid e-mail address extension.

So, again, this goes to the very core of inclusivity and diversity within the internet and to the way we identify ourselves within the ecosystem. So, this is on top of the board's priorities, it's been incorporated through the strategic plan, and we will continue to develop strategies and means to, as I said, enable the organization to better support the community in its attempt to achieve the Universal acceptance. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, quite a bit of work going on, and certainly a commitment in the strategic plan around that. Manal, can you talk a little bit from the GAK perspective but also from experience maybe in Egypt around this? It would be great?

>> MANAL ISMAIL: Thank you, Teresa. Let me start by saying ICANN introduced IDNs, this was a significant step and a milestone, but unfortunately, we're not able yet to bear the fruits of this important milestone without Universal acceptance.

Attend earlier workshop yesterday, the study, they mentioned -- Emily mentioned that I'm not sure about the percentage, but something like 80% or 81% of the registered IDN domain names are parked. They are not really utilized yet. We had thousands of registrations at the very few days that we launched the IDN, CCCLD, those are continuing to be static for a while. And now even declining because people are not renewing their registrations because e-mail addresses are not working and older Universal acceptance issues.

So, having said that and -- and, of course, Universal acceptance would be of benefit to the end users having a seamless end-to-end multistate -- multilingual internet experience but also I see it as a bigger market to -- to the private sector and now focusing more on the government side to answer your question.

Direct thing would be that governments would naturally want to communicate and reach out to their citizens in the official language of the country. So, again, we need to secure the communication in the language of the country. But also, to make sure they include everyone to the digital world. Those who master foreign language, but also those who don't. We're talking about the next billions and I'm sure the next billions have different needs from those who are already on-line. So, we need also to bear this in mind. Why are we talking about digital inclusion and having a digital society we need to make sure that everyone is included and no one is left behind.

So, definitely this would help increase internet penetration in -- at this advantage ed communities. -- disadvantaged communities, this would be also preservation for the cultural identity, even to those who know the language and those who don't have a problem or a language barrier. Again, preserving the cultural identity is -- is an important aspect as well. And also having meaningful access through the internet with everything moving on-line, all activities, all day-to-day errands and what we leave behind.

We try to coordinate this at the national level. We're starting with the governments since we have the government and it's good to have the government as a role model or at least proof of concept for others to -- to follow. We're working on awareness. And I have to say, we thought that maybe we can start by decision makers and this would facility everything. But out of experience and also confirming what Edmond mentioned yesterday, it turned out to be better to work, both sides, top down and bottom up, because, we got clearance to have a pilot for e-mail address internationalization, but then people who do this and implement it, they would also be introducing something new, even to themselves. And they have to give support to the new platform. So, they need to be really familiar with everything.

Because, again, the message is get it done, but without breaking anything that's working and without compromising anything -- any of the security measures. Everyone is kosher. So, it's taking longer than we expected.

Many workshops, many trainings, we are lucky to have Universal acceptance stake holder group ambassador in -- in Egypt so he's doing a great job reaching out to government entities, but also to the academic sector.

We have done a couple of hack-athons. And they tend to be tremendously useful, again, with the help of the Universal acceptance group. And frankly speaking, at the beginning of the hackathon, I was not that optimistic because the students didn't know anything about Universal acceptance. But by the end of those few days, they really developed some good stuff and even the instructors were impressed.

So, it's -- it's might not be something that would have an immediate effect, but, again, it's -- it's a good way of looking forward. And we also talk about the IDNs and Universal acceptance within the curricula of some institutes and some universities in Egypt.

And also, the GAK, we were discussing this, in Montreal, we decided to create a working group on IDNs and Universal acceptance. We hope this would also help us to reach out to other governments within the membership of the GAK and maybe establish the right channels to spread the word. Because one of the challenges of Universal acceptance is the need for wide deployment, otherwise, again, you won't benefit really from the -- from the -- from the idea of Universal acceptance. And I stop here. Sorry if I took longer than I intended. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Not at all. This is really informative. And the example of a hack-athon and some lessons learned from that and the conversation in the GAK and various thing s are opportunities to learn from each other, very much so.

Before I open the floor and the discussions to the panelists, including Dr. Data on-line and able to respond to anything, Nick, could I ask you to talk about the work of the dynamic coalition and what's happening?

>> NIKOLAS SMITH: First of all, I want to commend the work that my fellow panelists up here are doing. It's remarkable. I'll start with just some of the words that I heard from Dr. Data as well and Manal just now. What our dynamic coalition is trying to do is, number one, help the community. Number two, is to familiarize the people that we're working with.

Last year in Paris, we had the inaugural kickoff of the DCNSI -- the DNS issues.

That's a broad topic. We wanted to focus on one area of particular importance and we felt Universal acceptance was the first we wanted to take our initiative for the first year.

So, here we are, it's been a year since we started. Throughout the year, we -- the DCNSI has participated in multiple meetings they had earlier this year. We had the luxury of being able to engage with a lot of colleagues in the room around the table and as well as in the audience. I see some of them from C-DIG as well. Just amplifying the importance. And I want to be very clear that our work is never been to necessarily just duplicate the work that's being done by the ITF or the UASG. It's to complement.

And we wanted to be very strategic in our approach to how we did that. But most importantly, I think it goes back to the question of how we get there.

Yesterday we had our session for 90 minutes talking about some of the areas. And I think it speaks to what's been set up here is that it's -- it's not a one size fits all equation to this. To get public sector readiness to get that understood, you have to work through multiple layers to actually achieve that success. We'll continue that mantra as respect to where our plans go from here, like I said, we did choose Universal acceptance for the first year. We did take part in a pilot survey where we did not have the responses that we were hoping for as it is very challenging. But what we're planning for in the first part of 2020 is to do a comprehensive survey, global survey, to get that out there to provide those resources and tools.

Beyond that, we'll shift to a different topic within the DNS. But, this has been our focus. Lastly, I think the help piece is so critical. When we first started in Paris, we had I think roughly about 20 members. Now I think we're probably over 100. So, within a year's time, I -- all we want to say is thank you. And we look forward to continuing to work with the community.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Dr. Data, do you have any comments before we open it up for discussion, if I can turn it over to you? Maybe? No? Do we have him on-line? Or should I open it for -- just bear with us for one second.

Why don't we do this, while we're waiting to get him on-line -- oh. We have multiple forms of communication happening.

While we're waiting for that part of the technology, why don't we open the floor for any panelists or discussion around this? Roberto, if I could return it to you?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Internet user. I would like -- considering also ICANN is present as stuff is brought to this discussion.

I -- yesterday I have thought because of all of the problems that I hear about, e-mail not working and so on, I had this idea of just getting for myself an IDN domain name and then within trying to figure out how does it feel to have an IDN e-mail address and what are the problems? And, you know, how does it work?

So, I went to the website of my favorite registry that -- that this PIR still in spite of what is happen ing recently. And I found a list of all of registrars.

411 registrars were registered.org. And as you probably know, PIR has also dot ORG in different scripts. And so, I picked up the lesson comprehensible to me which is the Cyrillic. And I will register the domain name with the registrar with Cyrillic. I looked at the list. Out of 411, there were only 28 registrars who proposed dot-org in Cyrillic. Not even my favorite registrar in this room today, had the dot-org. There’re business models for registrar, and if a registrar doesn't -- doesn't find this a good business, they are perfectly free not to do it. But I was wondering, from ICANN's side, is there anything that ICANN can do in terms of putting different conditions for the -- for the commercialization of -- of domain name in Cyrillic. I know I used to be on the board of PIR, for instance, PIR has still to pay yearly fees regardless of the fact that the IDNSR are sold are not. So, there seems to be coming in my opinion that ICANN can do and so it can be an incentive. Not the burden of the registry and the registrars in order to be -- in order to push more the sale of domain name. Because I think that we are in a vicious circle.

So IDN's don't work because there's not enough pressure from users to demand -- to the infrastructure provider to fix things. But since the infrastructure is not ready, then the users are not even buying the IDNs, so, there's something that we all have to do in order to break the vicious circle. Thank you. Ed

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Does anybody want to respond to Roberto there on this? You want to respond? Yes. I will turn it over to your favorite.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning, Mikahli -- from Black Knight hopefully still Roberto's registrar, not sure. Roberto does raise a couple of interesting points but I'm not sure if they're the right points. The -- it may be there is something that both the registries and ICANN can do to incentivize registrars to carry IDNs. But, I mean, of the IDNs that we've carried, the issue we ran into, there's little demand. So, I'll take the example of the dot IE-CCCLD, the language in the current script is essentially Latin with one or two extra characters, but like a basic accent. So, in some respects, similar to Italian.

The dot IECCLT existed over 20 years without the support of IDNs, so you couldn't register your name in the correct -- in the correct way under dot IE. And if you're looking into the difference between the words in the Irish language with the father and without the father, some of the differences are quite hilarious. For those who are interested going to FADA.ie where we published a bunch of examples.

When we launch ed it and we did quite a bit of marketing around this, the take up was negligible. I think at this stage, Toledo main names were registered with the accents. And this is for a European company connected, good on the document side where all of the official documents from our government are available in both languages and a lot of our staff would have names which the Americans and the audience would be incapable of announcing.

So, if we can't get people to register domains with a little accent on them in the European language, expecting them to register in some other more exotic language can happen. Is the infrastructure there in the countries where the languages are spoken? Are people producing content in those languages? Is that -- those are the other drivers that I would look at around demand, not simply a case of you now have this domain, but if the -- for example, there's other pressures and other barriers to connectivity, maybe those are the ones that we should be looking at rather than trying to get people to register a bunch of IDN domains that end upping with parked. Thanks. Roberto, I will check with my tech any -- technical team for enabling the IDNs for you.

>> MODERATOR: An interesting point, it goes to Manal's point about the whole experience with the content and the seamless experience in the communication system.

Rahm, thank you for waiting, this pillar is a bit of a challenge.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, I'm Rahm Mohan. One of the questions had to do with what things could be done. And in yesterday's session, yesterday morning's session, there was quite an insightful set of questions about why IDNs or the multilingual internet has not taken off. All kinds of different reasons for it. But one that seems quite appealing is that there is a market failure. Edmond brought this up.

If you look at this from an economics point of view, you look at the research, what is market failure, there's an inefficient distribution of goods and services in a free market. I think that's kind of the classic definition of what is happening with IDNs and with this entire ecosystem. Right? And the second piece of market failure is that individual incentives for rational behavior do not lead to rational outcomes.

You're seeing that as well in the IDN marketplace. You have folks positing this needs -- if only there was more education, more incentives, if only more registrar s offered this or if only there was more content, etc. but, perhaps there's a case to be made that what we actually should be looking at with IDNs in particular is we should be considering IDNs in the phase of development that it's at now as public goods. The way public goods are dealt with in society, you look at the upkeep of parks or the metro system or things like that, those are things that are -- those are goods that are undertaken with the pre-existing assumption there will be market failure, right? There is now enough evidence of almost a decade of offering IDNs in the marketplace that the private sector is not going to be able to just single handedly support the adoption or the engagement or the -- or the growth of IDNs in a multilingual internet. And maybe it's time to start thinking about IDNs as a public goods rather than a free market enterprise.

>> MODERATOR: That's an interesting concept. Edmond, can I turn it to you? Or Danka, did you want to comment? Edmond, please?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Rahm said everything I put my hand up to say. Just following through, Roberto mentioned -- I talked about it yesterday, I think we're looking at staring really as at a classic example of a market failure here. And the supply side is just not -- not ready to complete the work. And there's demand. The demand couldn't be revealed. That's one of the important problems.

But, I -- if we -- if we build on that, though, one of the things that we might want to think about is with ICANN's strategic goal, having this is part of the ICANN strategic goals, what can ICANN and the community actually -- actually proactively do? Because in -- in the past, we should have the market develop, we create the awareness and build it and people would come. It seems like that's not going to happen. But that's not -- it seems like there's evidence that that alone will not get us over the hump. So, now we got to go back and think through, is this policy? Is this incentives? Is this -- where in the community could this discussion continue to grow? And there -- that is one also one area that I guess for myself, that's the last few years, I couldn't quite figure out where in the community could this conversation actually get started so that some of the solutions for market intervention. Where there's failure, there should be market intervention. How could we get it started within ICANN or ICANN facilitated kind of groups to get this started?

>> MARCUS:  I think this discussion is taking place. The steering group, this there are many places where the there's a working group on this. We haven't found the mechanism, we can actually materialize the discussion and this this that's happening into actions, right? So, from the board's perspective, our strategic plan is a living document. We have set some goals there, some expected outcomes that we wish that we could actually achieve. But I think it's also for us as a board and for you as part of the committee to engage in this circle of community boards and organization to find the ways and the mechanisms structurally to implement what is been this cost and the conclusions you are reaching within the community into the elections and how we as a board can enable the organizations to support you in that effort. I would encourage you to engage, establish this dialogue, and try to find ways that we can operationalize whatever outcome of the working groups are establishing in order to achieve this common goal.

>> MODERATOR: You want to respond? Then we have Dr. Data.

>> Just a quick response. At the end of the day, we have to create public good and incentives, it's about funding. It's about how money is being part of it. That is part of the puzzle to crack beside some of the awareness that can be built from the awareness groups that you mentioned. But there's got to be some economic mechanism s. And that part we probably need ICANN to be part of the conversation as well. That's the reason, you know, I wanted to highlight that particular point.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, any comments to that?

>> I guess that's the kind of invitation I was doing, right? Let's sit together and figure out how to make it happen.

>> MODERATOR: We have Dr. Data back? Perfect. Let's give this a shot.

>> DR. DATA: Can you hear me?

>> MODERATOR: Very nice, yes.

>> DR. DATA: No

>> MODERATOR: We can hear you. Can you hear us?

>> DR. DATA: Okay. Great. I can hear you back. That's fine. So, I just wanted to thank Manal -- and the initiative for building the working group because it is very, very important section where we are working for built-in policies, bring in the policies for procurement and all that stuff, including the ILAC who has build up the entire system of -- the -- and also start ed working with us. And these initiatives I found here and the initiative as to take it for us. For all of us, we need to work together, adopt IDN, the wonderful idea that I hear is how we can take it further in different countries, keep it alive and thank you also for joining in this mission and making it better for all of us. Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Maybe I can ask you a question. I don't know if you heard the part of the conversation about the user experience but the comments that were made that's also about multilingual content that helps be a driver for a potential demand for the registration of names in IDN or the Universal acceptance abilities that you had flagged that you need to be addressed. Are there any experiences out of India that you're seeing or in the work that you're seeing about bridging with content more generally. We're focused on the internet acceptance side, but the bridging of the full experience.

>> DR. DATA: There is an option I can share here. The government -- started to offer Hindi. We're primarily Hindi as a language state and we have almost every content available in English on the website. The content is not available in Hindi. All of the -- the English, but we are an Hindi state. Things are changing. The government that -- and the situation, what do you do first? Do both. Let's clear the content. Let's clear the IDN and -- and let's bring them together.

India surpassed, if you Google right now, India has all of this -- the search is on reasonable content on English. It means the content -- it's getting consumed. We will have content more than the -- than the English content, whatever people are -- right now. In India for sure.

>> MODERATOR: Thanks, that's very interesting. Yes? Yes, sir, please introduce --

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm from India, the at large committee of ICANN. When I shared with the USG, I'm speaking right now in the capacity of the working group that ILAC has on IDNs. From an end user perspective, UA has become a very serious issue now. But as Jay mentioned, many people are coming out with e-mail -- internationalized domain names and e-mail -- I found that Wikipedia, the tenth largest site, does not access the user account registration. I don't see this. It's very multilingual. And that's the place where we accept the e-mail IDs. Now, yesterday the at large committee made a -- we got a call for a public community meeting on UA here in Berlin.

And here -- they're all in that meeting. And one thing we came out with was the at large community of ICANN, which is very diverse, global, has a specific goal of pushing the agenda of UA everywhere.

So, some of the bottlenecks that we mentioned, but the government is something that we can do in multiple countries. We have a presence in a lot of countries.

The IDN working group is include ing UA as well and we're going to involve all of the membership in specific regions like Latin America, for example, the reserve. Clear set happening on UA. It's pretty diverse. And we do have a lot of people with skills, like Edmond Cortez, the working group that we have.

So, I would just like to place on record that the at large is trying to reposition its working group to include UA as a clarity item. Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. And also, for the work that's under way there. I know that it bridges with many different groups. So that's going to be important.

>> Absolutely. Thinking about this in the context of why we're here in the IGF construct, this session is -- it falls under the category of digital inclusion. And one of the exercises that our coalition took part in earlier this year is that we put out some questions as it relates to the SDGs. And it was -- there was a consensus behind the DC coalition and our efforts within the realms of UA fall under SDG goal nine. And that goal wholly focusing on building resilient infrastructure and foster and innovation. So, the reason I bring this up, particularly, is because, you know, we're here at this Epicenter of how does this fall into really getting to our goals and achieving where we're trying to go. And I think that what we would encourage is I kind of alluded to earlier in my first intervention is wherever we go in terms of where this messaging should be, please utilize DC's like us that are willing to amplify that message.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. That's another important connection. Daka, did you have any comments you wanted to make on this?

>> Yes, thank you. This is -- a problem of Universal acceptance. I'm coming from Serbia, a country that has Serbian script as the primary script and the government is the government always, but we mostly use Latin.

But my point is -- the problem is it's very complicated. It's a country called Yugoslavia. When I go to register myself on various websites, I cannot find the name of my country because it exists only for decades. And then I have to register myself as Yugoslavia or Serbia and what was the intermediate name. And more often, I can find Serbia. This is something we have to work for. I'm here as a member. But I'm also an ICANN board member. But I would like to speak more from the IGF's point of view. And I think this is actually -- IGF is the right venue to talk about these issues because I see importance of Universal acceptance.

And thank you, Rahm and Roberto for bringing those to different perspectives. But I believed that Universal acceptance is actually an enabler for multilingual internet. This is something that's important for us. We need local languages to bring next groups, next billions of users to the internet. There's good work that's done by the ICANN community. The priorities that we spoke on the ICANN board. Often saying that the Universal acceptance is his pet project. So, a lot of that is done. But as Roberto pointed out, this is kind of a problem and we have to attack from different sides, I think Rahm's approaches are very good. It's something to it.

There's a bit -- it's similar to accepting IPv6 until there's no more acceptance, there will be no more requirement. So, I support the work and, of course, of the IGFs. From the -- and our deliberation of the workshops that are selected for IGFs, I can tell you there is very few proposals relating to the DNS and the Universal acceptance. So, we're happy to have this section here. But probably we need more sessions that will focus in the specific issues relating to that.

And also most importantly on the local level to require the website to work for the acceptance to accept e-mail addresses not only as communication, which is obvious, but also as identifiers for users, and to -- to work locally to create also demand from this side. Because this is a long-term problem. We have to be persistent and we have to work on all of the levels simultaneously. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Almost presenting a challenge to ourselves to see an increase in the functions at the IGF and reporting back an increase of statistics around this. Throwing that out there. Roberto, you had a comment. Is your comment this or do the on-line first to this? Go.

>> Roberto: Actually, an announcement. We're preparing a program 2020 that will be held to 12, June. And you have Universal acceptance on the program. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: That's actually great news. It brings to mind the idea that to your point, at the national and regional IGFs, it's a great opportunity to put it on the agendas for those programs as well and that can also be fed into the global IGF. Nigel, can I turn to you for the remote question?

>> NIGEL HICKSON: A question from Susan Chalmers, a member of the dynamic coalition as well and was in session yesterday. She says building upon the comments of Nick, the messaging that is put out needs to focus specifically on the power of Universal acceptance to enable digital inclusion. This could help to raise awareness and perhaps drive demand. Universal acceptance should become known to policy maker an as a tool to achieve a more multilingual internet. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. It does go back to how we pursue it from multiple angles, the technical, the content, or the full experience. Does anyone want to comment on Susan's comments or raise anything else from their own observations here? Mahili.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks, again. Around the Universal acceptance which has been touched on here, but I think the focus all the time tends to veer immediately to IDNs. It's all about getting it to work, which includes for Leon if Leon wants to be able to sign up for something using his -- or if one of my clients wants to use the dot-media or dot-blog or whatever. And speaking as a registrar and hosting provider, the kind of issues we've rub into is one around the kind of end user experience. You sold me a faulty product. Someone buys a domain name from us in good faith, sets up the e-mail. All that is working fine. They go to sign up for some kind of on-line service. They try to log on to the Wi-Fi in the hotel or in airports. And they can't. And then they're on to us going, what the hell did you sell me? This is not a real domain. Why can't I use this? I'll go back to my G mail address or whatever.

That's part of the messaging. It gets around the IDN aspect. It's fine, I get it. The bigger issue is if you talk to people -- are you registering domains in Latin characters, you still have thousands of web forms out there that do really, really crappy validation and if the domain is longer than three characters, it fails. You can't even register with some of the on-line services using a dot-name or a dot-info. And I think launched dot info in what? 2002? 2001, was off by a year. Don't attack me. That's been out there for 18 years. They can't do it. It's basic things. Now, the presentation yesterday we had with the lady from the German government I thought was really cool. That got me interested. It's like this is somebody, the government stepping up. That's the kind of thing that will be great to see more of

But the big challenge has always been how do we on the supply business side of it, whatever aspect, how do we encourage developers to use better libraries in their development? How do we encourage them to do better validation of forms. How do we get them to stop blocking everything from dot-.com. Thanks.

>> MODERATOR: It's important. Yeah, I see where you're going on that. LITO, you had some information?

>> Yes, thank you. I was thinking of what Miguel just brought up. The following round of -- that would be also an issue. We need to tackle the Universal acceptance for the long names, not -- not only IDM, which is -- which is, of course, the objective is to bring more people in the internet with their own languages and scripts, but also the long -- are also -- if we open that and we expect that many applications as we have done in the past or more or less, we need to solve this issue. So, the market -- the original -- thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Manal?

>> MANAL: Yes, when we say Universal acceptance, people think ITN's only. We keep reiterating this message every time. And, I mean, even at Montreal, we had a few members were saying oh, this is the first time. We knew it also implies new ones. The message is not there fully. And obviously this made more members decide to join in the new working groups. I hear where you're coming from. By the way, thanks to India for deciding to leave this working group and they have a success story already. So, I hope we can see some progress.

>> MODERATOR: Do we have anybody remote at all? Yes? Yes, sir?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, thank you. I'm from China. And also, I enter the -- on the ATRT from the -- but just to say UA shows in my personal capacity. I think it's very important that we talk about the user experience and the also the big company like Microsoft, like Google, we launched some program to enable the website. So, if we can involve them in to the ITF session to talk about their benefit, their experience, how the benefit the low community and how they earn their benefit on the social -- this will be -- it will encourage more stakeholders into this process and enlarge the experience to across the countries.

And, also, another thing -- another thing that since for the -- for the -- we talk about the digital inclusion. That's -- we -- we do the work too for the next billion or next -- or underserved region. But I saw where experience including China, India, and also Africa, the most growth is for the mobile internet. For the teenager to never use the browser on PC but mostly use is mobile apps. But we cannot see any domain name on the app. But, I also -- in China, on China, we can have the shore link, the shore domain in the accountant when we use a WeChat, we will include that link in that content. So, it -- but most of the use but if the ShoreLink is impacted the domain name like the IDN or like the long domain name, but we cannot link that from the IPP through the website. So, it's a -- it's important that we can enlarge our android system we can do that. The mobile phone manufacturer and also the bigger provider to improve the user experience. And I think it's really important. For the -- for the young people, young users, and those in the next billion people. In the community. We have the three ambassadors from the China up to the USG. And one of them come to the Montreal in the engaged the USG workshop and the session. And to introduce some from Chinese community. And after that, the -- in the last months, we discussed several times with the ambassador and also we worked with the internet society of China and also my colleagues, the think tank, and we use -- we have drafted a plan from the China community and worked with the ambassador Oso, USG and OSO registry. Not only from the local company like Ali -- Cloud. But also we have failures, have their local business being in China. We can work together. Maybe next month later in December, we'll have a plan to share with and so we welcome all stakeholders come together. We work together. Okay. Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. You really highlighted also having the relevant parties in some of the panel discussions. And I think that's an opportunity for us in the future to the point about making this larger topic also upcoming IGFs. But Roberto, I wonder if we might pose that as a challenge for your agenda for EuroDiG as well.

Any other questions for the panelists at all? Nigel, you have one on remote?

>> Nigel: No, no one on remote. We have a short announcement at the end. But if you have any questions before that?

>> MODERATOR: Very good. Any of the panelists want to make any final remarks or observations before we go to our announcement? No? Okay. So, thank you all for what's been a very useful conversation and I think it's an important one. For multiple reasons for us to be continuing. So I look forward to seeing it on the program for next year. And hopefully at many of the national and regional events that are coming up between then and now. Nigel, to you for the announcement.

>> Nigel Hickson: Thank you very much. I'll turn it over to Adam who will say something. Dr. Data on the panel as well has mentioned that he would be happy for people to join the UA the Universal acceptance steering group. You can go to the website and register. It's UASG.tech and subscribe to that or come see me or another ICANN colleague and we can put you in touch with the website.

Next point, ICANN has a booth, come to the booth. We have a lot of information there. We have a QR code that you can scan and that's got information about Universal acceptance as well. Booth is just in the IGF village and Adam wants to say something about the booth.

>> Adam Peak: I'm a member of ICANN staff and let you know that 12:45 Wolfgang, who's very well known in the IGF community will be speaking at the booth about the nominating committee to bring in volunteers to join leadership decisions. Wolfgang explain s what it does and how it works. The committee is beginning the application process in mid-November for two months. Looking for expert volunteers to join the leadership of ICANN's various committees and councils and two members of the ICANN board. Please go on to the booth. Booth 35 in foyer three, the one on the left-hand side as you would walk up the main corridor here. So 12:45, Wolfgang talking about the nominating committee. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Great. Thank you, everybody. Enjoy the rest of the meeting. Thanks.

[ Applause ]