Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

Cheryl Langdon-Orr, Hong Xue led a few workshops related to IDN and other issues and were panel speakers in a few other workshops.

Cheryl Langdon-Orr, V C Vivekandandan and Sivasubramanian Muthusamy were speakcers at ” Lessons Learned from the Engagement and Facilitation of Internet Users into Policy Development and Processes within ICANN via the ICANN Board’s At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) .”

Cheryl was one of the panelist at the ICANN open forum.

(Cheryl and Hong Xue participated in a number of workshops, the precise deails of the theme, co-speakers and presentation links are to be obtained from Hong and Cheryl and to be unploaded in the wiki.

The third Internet Governance Forum (IGF)meeting is to be held in Hyderabad, India from 3-6 December 2008. This is the first IGF meeting in Asia-Pacific region. IGF is now calling for workshops, best practice forums and open forums. The deadline for submission is April 30.

APRALO, as the AP region Internet users’ organization, should consider whether to present in such an important international forum. One of the themes of this IGF is multilingualization, which is particularly important for AP Region that is extremely diversified on languages and cultures. APRALO may consider joining the relevant plenary or organizing an open forum or workshop on the Internet users’ multilingual participation in ICANN activities, addressing the cutting-edge issues, such as multilingual DNS (IDNs), multilingual services and multilingual policy-making.

APRALO will request funding from ICANN but the fund could be very limited. For budgetary purpose, could ALSes submit if they would like to participate the meeting and if they need the funding for travel. There may well be a few people who will attend the IGF anyway, so they won’t need any funding. If you need to be funded or perferrably partially funded, please leave your name, ALS affiliation and contact info. below.

The participation of the local Internet user community is considered necessary in the successful implementation of IDNs. This session will look at the experiences of several early adopter TLDs who may have involved the local community in the process of implementation of IDNs, to different extents, as well as users who have participated in those trials. Best practices and lessons learnt will be presented, and the discussion will focus on the practical implementation of these IDNs with the full participation of end-users.

The workshop has been successfully held on Monday November 12, 2007. The Speakers talked about new IDN technical developments that will greatly benefit the users, particularly the IDN application in email system. Email and whois are the two ASCII-only fortresses against the tide of IDNs. IDN email application will significantly liberate the IDN users from the chains of ASCII. The Speakers also presents the different implementation models and polices developed by the local user communities, such as Japanese-speaking and Polish-speaking communities. It sufficiently proves that only the local language communities can and should determine how to implement the IDNs. Hong Xue from ALAC presented a couple of policy considerations on the IDNs. She strongly argued that failure to implement the IDNs and continuous delay have become a breach of the principle of freedome of expression of non-ASCII script users. The workshop was warmly applauded by all the audience, including scores of governmental officials from 27 countries and the representatives from business sectors, civil society and academics.

The most important decision made at this meeting is the change of the Chair of the Board. Dr. Cerf retired and Mr. Peter Thrust from New Zealand was elected as the new Chair.

While ICANN celebrated for itself vehemently, it achieved very little on policy development. No decision was made on the new gTLDs implementation and IDN ccTLD PDP or fast-track solution. The conference was still full of boring and empty reports and failed to provide the effective translation services (not even Chinese that occupy a quarter of the whole CA population). Anyone from audience who would like to speak will have to wait in the long queue in front of the mike.

I submitted to the Board the IDN status report on behalf of the ALAC. I wonder if GAC or GNSO did the same thing. There is no punishment for not responding to the Board’s request. Neither is any rewarding for so doing.

Are these ICANN meetings strengthening “the single, global, interoperable Internet”? You bid.

Vancouver’s weather in October is normally warm and pleasant before Halloween, but this year is not. At least in the week of October 14, it was cloudy, rainy and most unfortunately cold. The 2nd Annual Conference of EDGE-NET, predated with a series of workshops, was held on October 15. The purpose of the EDGE Network is to help Canada, as a middle power between the developed and developing countries, develop effective strategies to play a leading role in the new economic order of the 21st century.

I attended the WIPO Development Agenda Workshop and discussed with other participants about a series of 15 chapters for publication. This is my second EDGE meeting. The first one was at the end of November 2006 in Ottawa.

For information on EDGE-NET, please see http://web5.uottawa.ca/weblaw/edge/index.php