International Trade Lawmaking @ 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.

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.