Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

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.

Internet politics is a new form of democratic politics. Blocking and sealing the net will not fulfill the need of Internet politics. These are the conclusion published on Beijing Daidly by 4 authentic Chinese scholars on laws, politics and sociology. Is it signalizing the change of the online weather? No clue.

http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007-06-18/094213253766.shtml

Proposals to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet , specifically China, were rejected by Yahoo shareholders.

Last year, Human Rights Watch, a New York based campaign group, accused Yahoo, Google and Microsoft for “carrying out censorship for the Chinese government”.

Neither Yahoo nor any other company has released a list of websites that have been de-listed for their political and religious content.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6747095.stm

In May, Symantec antivirus program wrongly identified two system files in Windows XP Chinese version as Trojan and paralyzed the users’ system by removing these files. Some Chinese users have filed complaints against Norton and sought for compensation.

However, network security experts in China have already suspected that Symantec got it right that these two files are indeed intentionally-installed backdoor by Microsoft to spoof the Chinese computer system.

http://www.fengnews.com/article/2007/0524/news_5489.html

Thailand government issued compulsory licenses against the patents for HIV drugs, which make its country into the Special 301 priority watch list of the USTR.

http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/06-07-2007/fe89006df9516353.html

Italian authority did the same thing to reduce the costs of medicines for the reason of antitrust. If high prices of patent products could be deemed as a cause of unacceptable monopoly, developing countries would enjoy much more flexibility in coping with technical innovation and public health crisis.

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/health.info/twninfohealth086.htm