The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual 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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>> We all live in a digital
world. We all need it to be
open and safe. We all want to
trust.
>> And to be trusted.
>> We all despise control.
>> And desire freedom.
>> We are all united.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Okay. Hello, to everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all our participants and speakers. So you are at the Town Hall session Universal Acceptance for Wider Access Through Collaboration. We spend this meeting in the hybrid format. I hope that those who are on the call, in the hall, they can see our speaker there. And as our members from USG probably also there in the room. So guys, you can show up and rise your hands. We will communicate during this session through online tools.
Today, Dennis Tan Tanaka is our remote participant moderator and will help you during the session. Please use all the possibilities in Zoom chat.
Thank you, Dennis, for the support. Today, we will discuss the Universal Acceptance for Wider Access Through Collaboration and how it can facilitate the better social inclusion and wider access particularly for end user says that prefer to navigate the global network and identify themselves online in their local languages.
And collaboration on global or local levels is required to foster the online process and finally make it reality. So this morning, I have read the DiploFoundation on the IGF read. It is stated if you are in this daily summary you belong to the 63% of the population that have access to the Internet. Estimated 47% of the world population or 2.5 billion have never access to the Internet. So you may know that most of these people are from non‑English speaking countries. Of course, one of the indispensable aspects of meaningful access and digital inclusion is the development of the local languages on the Internet. Such as local content, which empowers users to join the global knowledge base and upload their own stories. And use all benefits of online environment.
So I'm just checking if we are co‑hosts. Unfortunately not.
So I can't show my slides. Okay. I will try to explain it in some simple words. Universal Acceptance is another important aspect of truly multilingual Internet development. That makes access and usage of digital space easier.
>> I'm sorry to interrupt you. You are a co‑host now.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Great. Finally. Thank you. I hope you can see my slides.
>> Yes.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Okay. Great. So as I have said, Universal Acceptance makes access easier and because people can navigate online and use their Internet identifiers such as websites and email addresses on their local languages.
So in general Universal Acceptance means all the domain names and email addresses work in all software applications, so you can see on the screen the examples of such domain names and email addresses that are available online on the Internet to date.
So these are the domain names in 2014 and international domain names available since 2010 and earlier.
The systems and devices still not support them despite the fact that Internet standards and technical solutions for the developers are in place.
So the orange parts, some of the orange parts that you can see on the screen, that means that here you can use your local language. If you are a user, you should be aware that you can register and use such Internet identifiers online today. So if you are an owner or developer of a website or an application. So you should be aware that your customers can use these identifiers and your software product. It should be ready to work with them.
So this is like the official introduction to the Universal Acceptance concept. To remind you what we are talking about. But I would like to ask our audience, actually to share their opinion on what do they think about Universal Acceptance and benefits that each achievement can bring.
So I would like to ask organizers to show the poll on the screen. We have a short poll for our audience. If possible, please share the poll.
Is it possible?
So okay. I hope that the organizers can do it.
No, this is slides. Okay please stop sharing slides. I can ‑‑ okay. I think I have started the poll.
Hope our participants can see it. So you can take two, three minutes to look and read the questions and answer it. So we will show, I hope that we will be able to show the results at the second part of the session.
If not we will show them right at the moment when you have taken part in it.
But before you just express your opinion, I would like to start the main session and discussion with our panel today. According to the introduction to Universal Acceptance issues, the first side it can be considered as a problem of technology interoperability. The way the implementation goes so far, it brings to the conclusion that the global process requires overcome technical barriers and larger circle of stakeholder collaboration efforts. You are to work together to finally achieve adoption at all levels. We want to discuss this in more details today. We are proud to have the main stakeholder Groups involved. Those that are closer to end user needs and represent their interests and the technical implementers that are using the support in the software products and even already done it.
So okay. My first question to the panel will be the following ... so from the perspective of your stakeholder role, what are you doing so far or what can be done for the wider universal acceptance collaboration and what potential collaboration is needed from whom and how is needed from your stakeholder Group to force Universal Acceptance achievement? Our speakers will have up to five minutes to share their opinion. And our audience is invited to ask questions that we will share with the panelists.
We will start with the end user side. Okay. Before introduction of the speakers, I think that our participants have taken part in the poll. Okay? I'm closing it. I will try to share the results a little bit later.
Okay. So our first speaker Sylvia Herlein from LACRALO is representing the Civil Society stakeholder Group. Okay. Sylvia.
>> Sylvia Herlein: Hello, can you hear me?
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: I think I have to share your slides. Unfortunately, just a second. Um ...
One minute, please.
So here they are, Sylvia.
>> Sylvia Herlein: Okay. Perfect. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me on this important panel, I'm Sylvia Herlein, I want to share the experience of the Latin America and Caribbean regarding Universal Acceptance. Next one. We are part of ICANN. We are 61 organizations RALO, representing Internet and users. We have at least one representative in each country in Latin America. We started the Universal Acceptance of domain names and email addresses. We created a Working Group to study the impacts of the Universal Acceptance. Next one, please.
We represent the user of the Internet, the first measure to generate awareness among our people was to conduct several webinars explaining this new topic for the representative of the organizations to create the knowledge of the name to implementation to end users. In order to awareness with technical stakeholders directly, we do some webinars in Bolivia, Paraguay, Nicaragua and other organizers and did work with other Groups like DNS Women to help us spread the news.
Next one, please. To create awareness among Latin America technical and software developers, concerning the need to update and prepare the crypts are, we create the Universal Acceptance Group with ICANN and help. Launch in 2021, the training program consisting of four sessions covering key topics such as email address, internalization, Universal Acceptance for java developers and how to engage Universal Acceptance activities. More 100 participants from 14LAC countries participate in the training. Next, please.
And what's next? We're going to do the same and more. For example, we are preparing study that will try to repeat the study already done in Brazil, that consists of 100 local sides with the country code or most used site in each country to identify if they are ready for Universal Acceptance or not. ALAC community are preparing another training program for the next year. So you are all invited to participate in the RALO universal acceptance training program in January 22. The biggest challenge is overcoming apathy and lack of care from technical community, Internet providers and CCTLT and also multinational companies including Governments operating in our Region. So that they understand the importance of this issue.
For example, is Government require Universal Acceptance as required to be in procurement. I suspect we will see immediate jump in acceptance. Thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you, Sylvia, so much for your representation and your slides and activities.
So Dennis, unfortunately, I can't see the chat ‑‑
[Coughing]
Any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to share them, okay?
>> Dennis Tan Tanaka: When you are showing the slides, it was on PowerPoint and not slide show.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: On my screen, they were in the slideshow. Okay. Our next speaker from the user side is Cengiz Acarturk I'm sorry if I pronounce the name incorrectly. From the Middle East technical University. He will represent the Academia center. Cengiz is in the room. Okay? If I need to share slides, I will do it once again.
>> Cengiz Acarturk: I hope it works so people hear me. Hello, I'm on‑site, good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody. My name is Cengiz. I have been a faculty member at the cognitive cybersecurity department in the University. I'm at the University in Poland. So I represent here the stakeholders in Academia in general. And I want to present a perspective ‑‑ an academic perspective to UA, higher education institutions should start with the aspect of presenting the higher education activities. They have three major missions. This is well known, research, teaching and community services they do.
And each of these perspectives indeed has something to tell about Universal Acceptance. First of all, from ‑‑ I will also take this academic perspective, the researcher's perspective, I understand. Think about Universal Acceptance. First of all, it is a domain of technology acceptance. What do we mean? It does the following. When you develop novel technologies, people usually resist. It is not easy for the societies to accept it and start using it. And as an example, consider vaccination, mRNA, and similar technologies. People said, fine, that is wonderful technology, but when had comes to implementation, you start to observe hesitations that they do not explicitly verbalize.
You try to understand how people perceive the technologies. And here my perspective I would propose in this talk ‑‑ very short talk, is that we can conceive Universal Acceptance as an instance of technology acceptance and follow the research methodologies for them. What is meant by research methodologies there are questionnaires, technology acceptance, model development. You have to do them in most cases as cross‑cultural studies in different culture. So it fits very well in a collaborative approach to UA studies. I think this is one of the major domains of collaborative research from a researcher perspective on Universal Acceptance. It should be followed up by longitudinal research to allow us to observe what is happening in time so that we come up with dissemination strategies to make it stronger.
So the implementation stronger. So this is the research perspective.
The second is about teaching. We're all familiar with that. Higher education institutions most Universities, they do undergraduate teaching and they do graduate teaching. You know?
These technologies, as for the new technology, it takes time before they find their place in academic curriculum.
So for example, to make more concrete, consider the work on human computer interaction and human robot interaction.
For a long time, they have not been included in academic curricula in sciences as part of let's say a formal part of the curriculum. It was only individual efforts of the researchers to introduce those new concepts in their lectures, especially in undergraduate studies. So what about UA then? It is not existing recently in academic curricula. But in future, it will find its place, especially in computer science engineering. Science and technology departments, and possibly in computer education instruction, technologies curriculum.
So for this, we should collaborate with institutions that offer such curricula for those departments such as IEEE and others, this is another pillar to approve the Universal Acceptance in a global light, let's say.
The final one is the community services. This is the third mission of higher education institutions. And they usually cover computing services and technical support services in Universities. And these are also places where technologies are disseminated first at University then society.
They have chances to collaborate globally to offer UA compatible student services, for example, for international students. So this is kind of a necessity that we will need more and more in future.
Another point for collaboration is that very brief, this is the last point I want to make. Is that UA training for the public can be done through those services at Universities. Because Universities are higher education institutions are usually considered trusted bodies by society and this is a good channel to disseminate UA related concepts to the Universities and then to society at large.
So thanks for your patience, these were the points I wanted to make.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Okay, thank you so much Cengiz. This is really insightful input. I believe that research is absolutely needed as sometimes we do not understand totally the influence on the local end of which how our mentality of how we think and try to express ourselves. So we really need more information on how different languages work with people minds, I think.
It also helps us to understand the behavior that people demonstrate online, probably, because it can be connected with the usage of their languages and the culture that comes under it. So I think that the research in Academia sector involvement is absolutely necessary.
And also our next speaker to represent the end user side today, this is Anil Kumar Jain from national Internet exchange of India. He's representing the opinion of Government.
So Anil, please, the floor is yours.
>> Anil Kumar Jain: Thank you Maria, thank you for giving this opportunity. Universal Acceptance is a very important aspect not only for India but I think the whole world.
Initially, when you started you said around 53% of the people are able to access and 47% people not able to access Internet. But I want to add one more aspect of this. There are even in English speaking countries, there are people who are not literate, who are not able to read or, you know, understand English also.
So basically, Universal Acceptance should be not only with nonspeaking population, but should also deal with the nonliterate or illiterate people also. Looking at the role of the Government in India, we are 89% of the Indian population is non‑English speaking. It is very important. Although, we are the largest connected country with more than 850 million broadband users, similarly, we are largest nonconnected country also. As I said, because of Universal Acceptance.
The role of Government, which we look, is that we set the standard. We monitor the implementation of the policies which are defined for all, including all multistakeholder. We also should mitigate the barriers in case we have any problems in implementing and using the technologies.
And also remove any stakeholder issues, in case the multistakeholder cannot collaborate because of certain issues. I think the Government role comes in that.
In India, India is making subgroups to ensure that email providers separately. Website designers separately. Browsers and I.T. applications, they should be able to set up their own targets and implement the Universal Acceptance as a concept.
So what steps we have taken, we have created a multistakeholder stakeholder Group. It is a Group which represent Government, non‑Government, Civil Society, technical, Academia, everybody put together. We are forming ‑‑ going ahead with the Universal Acceptance implementation.
Now, here, what we have done is we are saying ‑‑ we are setting standards saying that email provider. Now, whether if they are reality we provide 5 stars. If they are not UA ready, but available, we give star. Now everybody, the website designer or browser, they will get a star. It will indicate whether they are close to UA readiness or not close. It will motivate them to go to the next level.
We are bringing organization together like Google, Microsoft, Reddit, Xgenplus, and others to undertake their own role in UA readiness and UA implementation so everybody understands their own role, they understand the collective role together as a Group to implement for the nation. They are asked to self‑set their targets. It is not the Group which is mandating them. It is not the Government that is mandating them. They will set up their own target, you know, the browser organization, like JOHO will say I will be ready by March 2022 or June 2022 and we with implement together as a Group.
We have started working like this. We are providing a free digital identity to over one hundred thousand villages in the country.
Basically the website will be provided free. The domain will be provided free. The email will be provided free. In case after providing, one digital entity to one village, in case more people want, then that can also be provided.
We are promoting lot of content generation in local languages, for example, 96ia has undertaken a promotional scheme. If you are able to upload content in non‑English language then you will be getting some cash prize, plus certificate, and all this similarly, in case the web designer, if the web designer is local language, excellent. They will get a huge ‑‑ maybe around $10,000 and certificate to promote them.
So these kinds of efforts are being done to generate more and more content in local languages and we are distributing the free IDN emails with every IDN in this country, so IDN alone has no meaning. If we are able to provide an email in IDN, I think that will take further to the next level of implementation. India is the only country providing IDN in 22 official languages. I think this is the country with the largest IDN. We hope and understand the purpose of Universal Acceptance. That is what is inclusive broader Internet is possible. Thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you so much. I'm impressed how much India do for Universal Acceptance implementation. This is a great example. Many of us should follow it. Thank you, Anil, once again. I would switch to another part. Actually to the implementers part right now. All of our speakers from this side, they're representing the technical community and Private Sector companies. So the first will be provided to the Ajay Data. He represents the Universal Acceptance side from India. Another side from India. Ajay, you have five minutes.
>> Ajay Data: Thank you, Maria, I hope you have my presentation. Thank you, Maria. We are discussing UA at IGF and so many speakers are speaking. As a Chair, I have spoken now ‑‑ this is an opportunity for me to share a bit of technical side and what technical community can do. Next slide.
Please bring it to the slideshow, Maria, please bring it ‑‑ no, it is gone. Yeah. That's right now.
So that is the last slide. Go to the first slide, please.
Yeah. That's it. Thank you. As a technical community, we have many framework and software, any website, technical community comes in the picture. As a technical community we need to oversee the remediation of standards, tool, languages, and platforms to be UA ready. This is not just the part of the UA, but also done in the standards and other organizations. They're talking about how do we make the UA ready platform and applications? That is all a part of the technical community. The UA technical community works actively in that along with the major tech Working Group together to make sure that technical Working Group is delivering what is required in the world. Another part is the built platforms and softwares which are UA ready. My friend Mark will speak about what Microsoft did. But this is what companies are doing to build platforms that are UA ready. Google made the Google AEPs ready and so is Microsoft and Apple and Xgenplus. We made our software UA ready.
I have this initiative in my own edition, where not only the media platforms, the media content platforms are UA ready. The media platforms are now UA ready. It can have acceptance of email addresses in Hindi and all the languages can communicate and register and sign up through connections and register.
And mobile apps, which are mentioned here. The data mail and my primary software which can also host. This is a technology role that you all have. One company sitting in India is not enough to deal with the whole world. We all technology providers, all have to move in the direction so when they have the application ‑‑ maybe it was [audio skipping].
And that is what we are wanting to do. Next slide, please. So how you can experience little bit. Those that are listening to me here, how do we get and capture application whether you are UA ready application or not?
The first roadblock is how do you get an email address. Can you send an email? Here I'm offering you from the technology side. We did this exercise in ICANN in COVID when we provided the free email address to the app to everyone that wanted to try the application. So now you can install that app and get an email ID. Not just Hindi that is mentioned here, but draw in from any language, any language of your choice and try it out in your application. The idea is to experience what UA is about. Get an email address in a non‑Latin character and try it out. See if it works or not. If it doesn't, fix that bug. The technology community role is to ensure it doesn't reject, it should be flawless.
Hopefully host your IDN. If you want to host it, we provide the free ‑‑ this is basically an initiative from my company to support the UA and let people experience how they can enable their applications and if there is a problem, the whole community can support. Next slide.
That is our role as technical community, to help companies see UA benefits. That is important. I get this question quite often about how and why I should invest a dollar to make an application UA ready. What is the email address, who is using it? Who is the IDN? I need to tell them. It is a clear benefit if I can tell them one line as a technical and commercial person, it is a clear benefit if you are not UA ready you will miss lots of customers.
Help implement UA practices in all organizations. We're told they are UA ready, if they are stuck it is a role to break the barriers and ensure UA readiness happens. And that is where the role of technical community we're breaking all the barriers, which community want and which organization want. And they're provided those solutions for the need.
Also demonstrate like you experience the email addresses and hosting on IDN, they need to demonstrate by example. Microsoft demonstrated by making outlook UA ready. Apple demonstrated by iOS 14 version supporting UA readiness for phase 1. This is examples of companies trying to demonstrate, and we all need to make UA ready software. This is how it is possible. When the large organization lead the part, it is much more easier from the community perspective that this is something that is required for the future.
Last part, which I want to express, because 7 billion people, we can't reach virtually everywhere. We need to train the trainers and the trainers and the trainers. And we need a chain of trainers to talk about UA readiness and help organizations to become UA ready. Thank you, Maria.
Unmute, please, Maria.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you. [Chuckling] I'm trying to control everything. But it is technical and not really easy sometimes. Thank you very much Ajay for your work and for the possibility for Indian users to have and get the IND email addresses. It is a great initiative and see that implementers do already provide such services.
So nice to hear this. And our next speaker will be Mark Svancarek from Microsoft from the global technology company. So we want to hear what the global companies do for the global market as well. Mark, please. I will share your slides. Okay?
>> Mark Svancarek: Hi, everyone I'm Mark Svancarek calling from Redmond Washington, United States. My little talk is about email address internationalization which I call acceptance ‑‑ Universal Acceptance is a team sport. You think of all the things that the companies do for Universal Acceptance. It is amazing what he gets done. For the rest of us other than Dr. Ajay Data, it is teamwork and persuading people to work with us. I will tell you about how this went for email and how it is going on right now. Next slide.
So email related Universal Acceptance is one of the harder topics, because there are a lot of moving parts, even more complicated than IDNs. So this has been a multiyear process. And there is lots of people who are involved. There is ICANN, the Cloud service corporations like Microsoft, there is standards experts and a community of passionate volunteers who started by trying to convince engineers and managers they should support the features.
You know, every product company has lots of things they could do. They have many opportunities. So you have to convince them that this is a good opportunity and that it is worth the effort. Next slide.
First I will share with you some arguments. These are arguments that engineers and managers will give you when you say let's become Universal Acceptance compliant. And they will say, hmm, I have never heard of this before, it must be very new. I don't want to do anything new. Of course, you tell them no, these are stable standards. They have been standardized and approved for a long time. Don't worry about that.
Another thing they might say is you know, phones, messaging apps, they're replacing email communications. There was a time when maybe people thought that. But now they realize that all of these things will co‑exist and in fact, email addresses, as identities are as common as ever. And so that argument is pretty easily refuted.
Another one is again, about phones. SIM cards will replace email addresses as identities. But not everyone has a phone. And some people share their phones with other people. So using the SIM card as an identity for multiple people, that is easily refuted too.
Maybe you think these are obvious arguments, people will bring them up and you need to know how to answer them. One of the most annoying ones is people don't really need this, because the existing system works just great.
And Anil gave many examples of why in India and elsewhere, that's just not true. I'm putting a link in the chat right now. This is a video that was made by THNIC in Thailand a few years ago. It is called Kai Kai Kai Kai. Mr. Kai wants to sell chicken eggs. In the Thai language Kai his name, Kai selling something and Kai chicken and Kai egg. They sound like that. And you transliterate them to the old ASCII. It is not working. Everyone should watch it. It is a great way to persuade people as to why Universal Acceptance is important in real life.
Another thing that comes up for email is people say, well, if say a Polish person sends an email to a Brazil person, they won't understand each other. How will that work? How will they exchange their contact information?
That's because probably that's not the use case. If you are a person who speaks many languages and you are very good at English and all the people back in the old country, your old family people they all understand English too, this is not a feature that you are depending on. But there are many people, as Anil said who only use one language or only literate in one script. These are the people who are going to benefit from these features. The other people, they should stop worrying about whether it is compatible with them.
A last one is hmm, we're not seeing a lot of demand for this yet. This is what we call the chicken and egg problem. At Microsoft we go back to our value statement, our mission is to empower everyone on the planet. This is a great way to empower people who aren't using English as a first language or the Latin character set as their language of reading and writing.
So that was ‑‑ these arguments were enough to convince Microsoft to support EAI, internationalized email across all of our email services and applications.
But it wasn't enough to do all of the use cases where we use email addresses as identifiers. For that, we still have to deal with the chicken and egg problem.
Next slide.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: You have less than one minute, please.
>> That's okay, sorry that took too long. We have technical standards people that helped us make comprehensive technical documents. We have several of those in UASG, we have a good one for EAI now. We had other people come in and help us build a test methodology. Using the technical reference document break out how do you test each of the features? Then we had other community people, volunteers, create the inventory of all the email apps and services and libraries that we wanted to become UA ready. And then we got other vendors that we hired using ICANN resources to actually perform these tests and share the results and then we could contact back to the technology providers and get them to become more UA ready.
Then using that inventory from above, we could also outreach to the industry people. That's where those arguments from the previous slide come in. You have to convince them. You have to show them that this valuable makes sense.
We are also creating a self‑certification process for buyers and suppliers. Anil was talking about giving people scores. We're trying to create a process where people can rank themselves, give themselves their own score. And then use that in a system like Anil was talking about. Finally, we have lots of ICANN resources such as messaging and local initiatives. So what Sylvia talked about. Those kinds of local initiatives are a big part of this. We also have academic outreach, academic analysis like what other Cengiz is doing and training materials. Microsoft or Xgenplus is interested in this, the only way to do this is by big collaboration across all of the community from people that are volunteers or experts in one area or experts in another area, everyone working together. Thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Okay. Thank you, Mark. I would like to say that Microsoft has already implemented this software for Universal Acceptance in the products like Microsoft exchange server, outlook home and outlook mail client, you are leading by example. I think that is also influence all the market, the global market and email industry. So this is really nice. Thank you for this effort on the initiative.
And our last speaker from the technical community and Private Sector is Walter Wu from the Chinese Internet registry and TOD registry. Walter, you have your five minutes. I will share your slides right now.
>> Walter Wu: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Maria. I'm very glad to participate in this session. Personally, I'm from Chinese ID registry and trademark. In my understanding the details of registry and registrar are playing an important role in the UA implementation process. The UA issue is the support from the software and Internet service vendor such as browser, email provider, the search engine. Social media software. During the process of communications with the vendors, one of most frequent questions was asked, you know, tell me how many users is using the IDN right now. That is a key issue. UA implementation is needed in software and other service providers. It is really the wide use of users. As an Internet user, you don't use the domain name as the search engine, it never works. The users don't type the domain name in the address bar, unless they are told so.
So the domain registry for IDN and new DTLD needs to tell them, tell the customer or the Internet user this is our name. And it needs the long‑time process since it needs a time to educate the users to remember it and get used to typing it. Therefore, the registrants actually play one of the key role to improve the UA environment.
The registrant promotion from the domain name generates the actual use for Internet users with the actual use, the software and Internet companies have stronger motivation to improve the UA experience.
So they apply the UA standard not only from ICANN and domain name student, but for fulfilling the demand from the end user. But only one exception, if the service provider believe the IDN will compete with their service or provide negative impact even in the short term they will hesitate to support.
But then, the provider may postpone the improvement of UA, however, that is a very high ‑‑ even in that case, if the Internet user have strong demand, service provider may eventually compromise. So in summary, the registries, and registrars, if you enlarge the market of IDN and especially educate the registrant to link the domain name to their Wi‑Fi, online store or single page to promote in their business implementation, the IDN domain names were shown and recognized and remembered by Internet users. The Internet user gradually get used to typing it. The UA environment will be better improved. So in this actual slide, I provide some showcases that our registry or registrar, you know, is to do in education to the end users, especially as SME customer will proactively print their IDN and their advertisement and package, and even the store. The wall of their store. And by follow some of the customers. We think even that process. When those domain names were shown will educate to the end users of the registrant and the registrant get higher traffic from the typing of the IDN. That is kind of a showcase I want to show to everyone.
And among the initial state and the other part is what potential collaboration of this role.
I think, you know, for example, in China, fortunately we do not work alone. We are actually form Chinese domain name initiatives in the Internet Society for China we just collaborate with a different industry organizations, like the China advertisement association and China trademark association, you know, to work with both industry organizations, they can understand the value of IDN and what is a key point, what is a key benefit to those ‑‑ for the user and useful idea.
Also the Government support ‑‑
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: You have one minute.
>> Walter Wu: Okay. So CDNI, China domain name initiative, also, we get the support from a community and eventually there is very important issue in China happen right now. Because on early November, the related Government publish 15, five‑year plan for the information communication development. And mention of the IDN UA to improve the application environment of the Chinese idea. So, as to further promote the uses of Chinese domain names. It definitely will increase the awareness of IDN and the UA initiative in China and increase the software company and put more resources on improving UA environment in China. It is my personal strong belief that the efforts will achieve more progress in China in UA in next few years. Thank you, everyone.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you, Walter, very much. I think this is a great achievement that you have the UA support in the national program. This is really nice example of how Governments can help to realize Universal Acceptance support on the national level. So that is really ‑‑ I congratulate you with this achievement, actually. And I hope it really helps. Thank you so much.
So, okay, thank you our speakers. We are going to some discussion with our audience and with our speakers as well.
So if you have questions, please post them in the chat. Dennis?
>> Dennis Tan Tanaka: Maria, there is a question in the chat box, actually directed to Mark. It reads, may I ask you to share does Microsoft light email service make support of hosting unique email addresses? If so, when could it happen? If not, why? Thank you. Mark just posted his response. There you go.
>> Mark Svancarek: I posted the response in the chat. We don't host mailboxes yet. We use Xgenplus for hosting our mailboxes. The reason is there is complexity in the way our identity systems work, we have to change things in order to do the hosting ‑‑ well, there is a complicated interaction between those things.
So when I said on my slides that there were still some features that were remaining, those are the ones that I'm talking about.
I suspect that Google is in a similar situation. We're just waiting for more marketed option. That will make those features be a higher priority. For now, you can send emails, you can receive them, you can do spam filtering. All kinds of email‑related things. But there are scenarios which real‑time collaboration that use the email addresses as identifiers which are not enabled yet. We're working on it.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Great. Mark, we wish you luck. Yes, there are also open source decisions that are available on the market, where you can use actually the email address with the Unicode part. Still it will look like Unicode on all levels before and after it.
Yes, we are waiting for the critical amount of the software to support Universal Acceptance and helps to move forward.
Great, I will show the results of our poll. I hope I will be lucky with it. I think you can see it on the screen, right? So most of the audience think the Universal Acceptance ‑‑ actually it helps, it really helps to get easier access to the Internet. And use it in a more light way.
So some of our audience, some participants think that it can improve the interoperability of the Internet and of course create opportunities for the development of new multilingual services online.
This is the result. Probably we can consider the results like a result of some Universal Acceptance promotional activities and work that is already done. So we are going to discuss the following question with our speakers. Anil, you have raised your hand? You wanted to comment?
>> Anil Kumar Jain: I just elevated the poll results. It was not a hand. Thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Okay. Thanks. We should mention there was some results in your implementation that have been achieved the last decade. I would like to ‑‑ but still ‑‑ we see that there are collaboration that already ongoing. And even between implementers. So this is nice.
As we actually have no questions, also, I would like to ask the last question to all our speakers, you have just half a minute to suggest how do you think ‑‑ how we can probably improve or probably change the ongoing promotional work and stakeholder engagement processes? So to improve and make really and really foster the implementation. Just suggest one, two concrete takeaways. And we will start from implementer side. So Ajay you will be first. Just one, two concrete suggestions because we have two minutes left.
>> Ajay Data: I think we have to take the steps. I say taking the first step is the first one. We have to take the step. It doesn't cost very much, you will be UA ready soon. Good part of the poll is nobody is there that didn't see the benefit. If you see the benefit, go for it. Why do you see the benefit and not go there? That is what we should all have and become a part of the success story of the multilingual Internet and UA readiness.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you very much. Mark?
>> Mark Svancarek: We should celebrate our successes so far. It is very easy to get discouraged or frustrated and say this is so hard, so much work left to be done. If you look back several years, we made great progress, it is still going on. So just keep remembering your arguments, keep up your stamina, and stay building your communities. Either your technical or local communities. And keep working together. We will solve it, eventually.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, you are very optimistic. That is right. That is great.
Walter, your suggestions, please.
>> Walter Wu: Yes, actually, as I suggest just now, I think the end user really of the application of the IDN is really important. Especially, you know, those big, you know, companies like even Microsoft. I know Microsoft registered a lot of IDN. Even on the end, Microsoft is all client. But that IDN domain is reserved as a domain name protection. Not really use that. So my suggestion is the big companies show a link IDN and show the IDN on web advertisement and everyone, every user in China know Microsoft, you know, IDN domain name in China. Not only for Microsoft, but for every big 500 companies globally, big companies show their IDN names. That's my suggestion, thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you, Walter. The end‑user side, Sylvia, what can you say, what suggestions from your side?
>> Sylvia Herlein: Okay. I think we should insist and go on in our work and need all domains and emails to be accepted within all application and devices to use Internet. So capacity building with end user is essential. So they can ask to the Internet providers the implementation of the Universal Acceptance. I think for our side, that is the way. Thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you, Sylvia. I agree, users should know they can get such services, right? Yes. Thank you. Cengiz, your suggestions, please?
>> Cengiz Acarturk: Thank you, Maria, very briefly, it takes time to understand why people don't move or why they start moving. For that reason, in practical terms, what we know is technology is done through pioneering people, this is not a crowded Group of people, but they're influential. So we should spot the domains of success and disseminate success to UA globally. Thank you.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you. And Anil, suggestions from Government side?
>> Anil Kumar Jain: Thank you, Maria. We should start sharing success itself. And the second is capacity building. We are doing that and I ask all other to appoint a Universal Acceptance Ambassador. They will go to the community, explain how it is done. And final suggestion, start a help line 24/7 so in case anybody has any problem in Universal Acceptance implementation, they can reach out to the experts and experts can lend their hand for better implementation. So that overall, success can get in Universal Acceptance. Thank you, Maria.
>> MARIA KOLESNIKOVA: Thank you Anil very much. Actually, we're at the end of our session. We need to conclude it. I think we really ‑‑ we make the really input ourselves by this session to the global cooperation and engagement processes, I believe so also we will put all this in the report. But of course we see there are some problems in place. And need to continue this work. We need to educate our end users more. We see that actually not so many applications, not so many discussions from the end‑user side. Our work also is to spread UA awareness further and make users pay attention to such opportunities on the Internet they can really get by using their local languages.
So thank you, once again, for all who have joined us today. For all the speakers, all the participants in the audience in Poland. So have lucky end of the IGF. I think this is real important that we are discussing these topics on such a global platform. Thank you all. We can close the session now.