FINISHED FILE

ASIA PACIFIC REGIONAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BRISBANE 2023

INTERNATIONALISED DOMAIN NAMES: IMPLEMENTATION AROUND APAC – LESSONS, CHALLENGES, AND OPPORTUNITIES 

AUGUST 29, 2023
2:30 P.M. LOCAL TIME

	
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>> CHRIS:  Good afternoon.  Good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world, everybody, and welcome to the internationalized domain names session, the implementation around APAC lessons challenges and opportunities.  I'm Chris and my job today is to facilitate and moderate this session.
Let me start by briefly introducing the then I'm going to have a very quick level set and then we'll get into a discussion.  This is not going to be a bunch of preparations.  This is hopefully going to be an interesting discussion and chat and there will be time towards the end for questions.  If you want to put a question in the chat as well you're very welcome to do that.  So our panel, let's start with Ram, a recognized expert in IDNs contributeing to the creation of technical and policy standards for their adoption and use worldwide.  He helped create the IDN working group of the ICANN board which is still going and oversees the creation and deployment of ICANN's regulation rules for the Internet route.  And also founded the community led Arabic script IDN working group.  Juliana is an independent researcher for digital technology people and society.  Eighty‑two he is a long‑term contributor to global voices, citizen journalism platform which also works on multi lingual Internet and she's going to bring to this session as an IDN user and how to manage a community platform.  On a multi lingual Internet.  She has creative research Ph.D. in the art of healing and decolonization and masters of indigenization ‑‑ Indigenous Internet governance and fellowship, baptism of fire has joined the panel to talk about Indigenous languages which are often spoken rather than written.
And Edmon is a long time contributor of the IDNs especially in the Chinese script.  He was a member of the Chinese domain consortium and chairs the ICANN board.  A technology company in 2001 and was an early pioneer in the development of IDNs and the Internet.
So I think you'll agree that's an exceptionally well‑qualified and interesting panel to talk about the issue.
Internationalized domain names or IDNs as they get called, basically domain names represented by characters other than the traditional A to Z ASCII characters.  They can contain letters or characters from nonLatin scripts.  So for example Arabic or Chinese or Latin characters with accents.  They've existed at the second level of domains names many years, affiliates, now digital through info offered the first top level domain IDN second level registration.  In 2004 in German.  At the top level IDNs were made first available as CC tail process and that was launched in 2009.  And in 2010 the first IDNCCTLDs top level domains were delegated and all in the Arabic alphabet that's three Egypt 36 of them visited by 2011 and then in October 2013 we saw the first IDNGTLDs being delegated one in Arabic, two in Serylic and one in Chinese.
There's a bit of a background.
Let's ask our panel to kickoff.
Jenny I'm going to come to you soon to talk about Indigenous languages but first I'm going to ask a question of Ram, Juliana and Edmon.  IDNs have been around the second level for 20 years or so and at the top level for over 12.  What do you think have been the biggest challenges to implementation in countries in the APAC region and what's the biggest lesson that you've learned from your involvement in IDN over the years?  Let's start with Ram.

>> RAM:  So I would say probably the biggest challenge on implementation has been that IDNs have been considered a technical problem to be solved rather than trying to express a human issue, an issue of communication instead of representing the challenge in that way for quite a while all of the focus has been on how to make the technology work.  How to make the various bits and pieces fit and mesh together.  So I think that is one challenge.
But perhaps the greatest ‑‑ maybe not the greatest but one of the other very large challenges has been that when you take a language that is written down that has a script associated with it and you take it and try to express it on the domain name system you necessarily reduce it to what looks like gobbledegook in English.  These are websites that get represented as XN dash dash something or the other.  Some string of letters and numbers.  And almost from the get‑go when he want to express a Web site and you want to write it on the Internet and write it in a browser or in the DNS and you want to represent it, you cannot really do it easily in your own language.  You have to convert it into this English like thing called ASCII, right?  And that has some practical implementation issues.  If you want to host a Web site and let's say that the language you want for all of this to be in is in Chinese you register a domain name and you want to have your Web site working in Chinese everything about it to be in Chinese, it's actually quite hard to do even today.  So that's a second thing.
The last thing is that the people whom you go to go as an end user, as somebody who wants to put their business online or who wants to express themselves through a blog or whatever online, you have to go to hosting companies.  You have to go to your registrar, your web hosting company to try and make all of this work and they run everything pretty much just in English.  So if you want to register a name in Arabic that runs right to left most places where you want to go and buy it it's extremely hard.  So practical challenges exist.  It's not just a technological issue but fundamentally I think the approach that the industry and the approach that our community in general has taken in retrospect could have been better.  We could have approached this as a linguistic communication and an interconnection issue rather than a technological problem that had to be pounded into shape.
>> CHRIS:  Thanks, Ram.  One quick supplementary.  You talked about the approach being a tech problem being looked at as a tech problem rather than a human issue.  At the very blunt end down at the very techy end have most of the issues do you think been dealt with or without going into detail while there's still a bunch of things to be done at the very blunt end of the tech slide?
>> Ram:  On the very detailed technical side the pieces are all in place.  Things just work.  If you know how to make them work.  But the way to make them work has been made quite complicated and it's obfuscated in many places.  But most of the technological challenges are more or less done.  In fact, I would say the only remaining challenge really that exists in this area is the challenge of making sure that all websites, all systems actually accept these names in a universal way.

>> CHRIS:  Thank you.  You talked about it being a human issue.  Let's go to Juliana who's very much at the other end, the pointy end of the usage end to get your perspective Juliana on the questions and the challenges in the Asia Pacific challenges in Asia Pacific region.

>> JULIANA:  Thank you Chris.  I think what mentioned about the technical challenge is mostly placed by everybody who want to implement IDNs in some country or doesn't use the Latin script in daily life.  In Indonesia when IDN is open for the Indigenous language who mostly doesn't use ‑‑ for information, Indonesian language is used but many is ‑‑ they use another script different like ‑‑ the idea is implement to explore their script into the work.  There a community working on this who make the code to try to implement on Internet and explain this is quite difficult when the Internet who mostly like 40 years use the Latin script and now to adapt to the language not used in Latin.  Especially in Indonesia where what is more difficult because we use the Latin script language take more time for the Indigenous people want to represent the script to register on the LD level because there's different.  Indonesia is Latin language and they not use script.  Take times of developing and make collaboration between the initial effort and the early ‑‑ maybe being explored more but the detailed linguistic in this but for me it's ‑‑ for now it's about the difficulty to from the national and for the Indigenous language who use nonLatin script.

>> CHRIS:  Thank you Juliana.  Thank you very much
and Edmon, your thoughts on the biggest challenges implementing in Asia Pacific and the biggest lesson you learned, dot Asia, that must have cause add number of lessons to be learned over the years.  Over to you

>> Thank you, Chris.  I guess I'll start by saying I agree very much with Ram that this is really not just a technical issue and we view and many of the technical issues has been overcome and in fact we're not only human but it's a social issue and come back to this.  Before that I wanted to mention something.  You kind of frame the discussion around, you know, we have been working on this for 20 years.  I want to make sure that people understand that it seems to be a very long time.  In fact, actually a lot of issues were dealt with over those 20 years.  The first ten years was the ten years that move the it can knowledge to where it is, the technical specifications, technical standards were being developed in the first ten years when I first got involved back in 1999 all the way until 20,008th, 2009 when the technical issues were dealt with because we're talking about very fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure.  Then we spent the last ten years actually working on the policies.  The policies that actually ensure that some of the issues, including security issues, including fishing homo gliff if I can attacks, some of the issues that even alphanumeric domains have not addressed like the zero and one and the O and the L and the I in the internationalized domain names multi lingual domain names, some of the characters look so much alike that we have to address them in a policy level.  So in the last ten years actually ICANN and the community work through most of the world's languages.  And I know we're coming back to some of those we're missing but it took a lot of time to work through the hundreds of languages and we ended up to I think about 30 scripts that represents most of the live languages in the world today and that takes time.  That was the last 20 years but now back to your question is that now is the time to implement and I think the biggest challenge is in my few a market failure.  Why do I say that because I do believe there's demand but that demand is hidden.  There's a latent demand because general users don't even know they can use a Chinese domain name.  They can use a Japanese or Korean domain name and they're not asking for it from their providers.  They're not asking for a Korean e‑mail address for example.  And that's the problem, I think, and that requires when ‑‑ I guess in economics when there is a market failure that requires a kind of market intervention and that's where some policies come into play.  I personally think that when universal acceptance was really picked up by ICANN a few years ago when the organization actually started down the path towards fully universal acceptance ready that was a big change in the entire community's awareness towards it and I think more of this needs to happen and the final thing that I want to say is besides market intervention I think these things require in my view a kind of social movement.  We need an IDN movement.  We need an IDNUA movement to push forward such that latent demand can be realized.  People don't even know they can in and for an e‑mail address or domain name in their own native language then of course we don't see the demand and of course the supply side is not, you know, really putting in the systems fully compliant.  And sometimes half ass implementation makes for the worst because it works here and then doesn't work there and then the trust gets diluted.  I think that's actually the biggest challenge we have right now I think.

>> Thank you, Edmon, and we'll come back so some of that in a little while.
So Jenny, I'd like to come to you.
Talk a little bit about Indigenous language in history and then I'm going to ask the other panelists to consider what can be done by the Internet that might help to preserve and nurture Indigenous languages, many which are spoken rather than written.  Talk a little bit about those languages and the history for us, please.

>> JENNY:  Hi, everyone.  I'm an aboriginal person.  I don't speak on behalf of all aboriginal people because we're all sovereign people.  Place where we are today, the language group that belongs to this land is called Jagura, J or Y are pronounced the same similar to Mexico.  Mountain range just over this way and that's where my people are from and our tribe name is Yugambe and part of the Bunjalum nation, consisting of a lot of different dialects.  I'm not sure if you've thought about where you are at this time but now it's called Queen's land.  And I'm wondering if you know why it might be equaled Queen's land?  If anyone's had any ideas?  So even ‑‑ not many people in Australia know this or talk about this but in 1859, Queen Victoria declared genocide on my people in the name of education and religion.  So that's why it's called queen's land because before we were all part of new south Wales that colony.  So we created our own colony called Queen's land and so basically naming is powerful and in Australia we can use one word to replace many words.  So we have hundreds of different dialects in Australia and we can eradicate ever naming them again by calling them aboriginal or Indigenous the same way that we can name Australia on the Internet as.AU.  We don't even have to say Australia.  It's a similar naming convention when you call people aboriginal and some people object to that word aboriginal because it consists of original but what is ab?  Usually you use a prefix like abnormal something that's not normal or not original in this case.  Yeah, as you may be aware, Australia was founded under the idea of Terinalius which means no man's land and called aboriginal people.  So we had our own Internet before white people came.  This is still in place in some areas of Australia.  We call them sun lines where we can tell a tree with a lot of specific Indigenous knowledges in that story but sometimes that story or that song or that dance could take three days to tell.  If you wanted to know more about this you could see a film called tin canoes but that goes over a long period of time.  Yeah, so I know about this founding of queen's land because when they started doing massacres along the border between queen's land and new south Wales where I'm from, my granny was given as a courtesy to the native police officer who performed a massacre that night with other aboriginal native police, so he was a white man from England and she was given as a trophy to him from the pastoralists to say thank you.  So after that people were forced to live under the Act and the act as we call it is the aboriginal protection act.  Basically they were trying to protect aboriginal people.  Well, it was under the guise of protection.  But basically they were forbidden to speak their language, enact culture, sing their socks songs, dance, or anything like that.  It's no wonder we find ourselves today in this place where we're in the top ten list of endangered languages in the world so a lot of people tend to look down on aboriginal people if they don't speak their own language but they're actually forbidden and it was flogged out of them to do so.  So some people view the English language as spelling, like it's casting spells and I would tend to agree with that because a lot of English words have really powerful consequence, especially for aboriginal people.  So Ram wanted me to talk about languages because a lot of people who still live in regional and remote areas away from the colony of the east coast have little choice, like they might ‑‑ if they're a language speaker, English might be their fifth or sixth language on the list of things that they have to learn.  So these are all consequence that is have to be dealt with when dealing with something like the Internet as we know it.

>> CHRIS:  Jenny, a lot of these languages are spoken languages and although they can be written, they're written in ASCII characters.  Is there any ‑‑ are there any alphabet that those languages actually have that are their own alphabets are they only spoken and therefore sort of trans lit rated into the ASCII alga bet?

>> Yeah, so our language is similar context to Indonesia that Juliana mentioned.  So we just have an oral language translated by anthropologists and a lot of those are set in stone now whereas languages used to be evolving.  Now they quite concrete.  You know, you can't use ‑‑ can't make much use of it outside of that.  So yeah it's all based on the English alphabet and a lot of letters spoken in aboriginal languages and some are more common than others.  A lot of Ks and in a lot of different dialects a K and a G is the same thing.  Yeah.

>> CHRIS:  So from the point of view of putting together the technology, it may very well be that the representing and let's be clear, Australia is not ‑‑ the Indigenous language in Australia is not alone in the world as being challenged by being spoken only and it may be that the technology is already there to deal with it but Edmon, you talked about in the context of internationalized domain names you talked about universal acceptance which is to do with making sure that the machinery can actually deal with inputs that are not the norm in the sense of what they use, what they were built for which is to be inputted in ASCII in Latin languages.  So for example your enrollment form for getting parking permit allows you to input text that is not just straight forward ASCII text.  It strikes me that maybe the universal acceptance movement for want of a better word may be one place that we could attempt to broaden what that is for to involve the embracing of Indigenous languages into the Internet.
Juliana, having listened to Jenny, did you want to make any comments about the Indigenous languages and the way that they are represented on the net?

>> Yeah.  I think before the IDN implemented some Indigenous languages Indonesia tried to transform into the ‑‑ it's similar with Latin script so we can write and type in the Latin script with some accent or some pronunciation.  So it's more easy to develop in Internet but when IDN is implemented, some Indigenous language want their local script, nonLatin script to be introduced and implemented to the Internet.  But I think it's become the bigger not only Indonesia but because the Internet now is reaching the remote area and some people the remote area is not using nothing as the daily ‑‑ more opportunity to risk this out.  The Indigenous people to increase them to implement and to preserve their local script into Internet.  But again meet the time to transfer from ‑‑ to transfer from the transcript and then to implement to the Internet.  So this thecal length to explain them how to implement their local language in Internet and how to deal with the security and it makes people some people ‑‑ some people to develop into a script into the Internet but some people still the more expert to transcript from the Indigenous people, Indigenous script into the Internet so this ‑‑ it is like ‑‑ it stop them to preserve the local script into the Internet.

>> CHRIS:  Thanks very much, Juliana.  Ram had talked about universal acceptance and effectively there being a market failure.  Any thoughts about what sort of incentives there might be we could create or that are already out there that may not be known to encourage that hidden demand to be unveiled and have the commercial embracement of IDNs effectively start to move?

>> RAM:  Thank you, Chris.
I think Edmon makes a provocative point speak being market failure.  I look about it in perhaps a different way.  I think that we are kind of missing the point if we speak about this as a failure of IDNs or a failure of implementation of IDNs or the acceptance of these IDNs.  I think the real over arching problem that we have to solve and find incentives for is about digital inclusion.  IDNs are a part of it.  Universal acceptance is a part of it.  But it really comes down to how do you build an environment, how do you build an ecosystem that both encourages and rewards apps, websites, interfaces, systems that are inclusive of the many languages of the world, the many scripts in which these languages are represented, the many ways, the many sounds of the languages how do you build a system that rewards that kind of inclusion.  It's education is the most obvious thing and there's some level of work already going on there but there's also access and one of the harder problems and perhaps Chris we can speak about that as a separate topic.  One of the harder problems with expressing languages, other languages on the Internet which was originally built with the Latin script as the basis, in many other languages there are is ambiguity that is built into it.  When is a G a G and when is it a K?  When is a J a J and when is it an H?  On the Internet in the Latin script model there is no place for ambiguity.  A G is always a G.  K is always a K, right?  So I think that some evolution is necessary in that area as well but that's a separate topic.  The fundamental rewards system I think that has to be created is reward system that provides a higher ranking on search engines or better placement at various sites if the app if the Web site has digital inclusion integrated into it versus sites that do not do that.  So I think that's an example.  I also think that from a regulatory point of view from governments, this is an idea that Edmon and I have been advocating for a while, when procurement happens, I think it's such a terrific way to uplevel everybody.  When government price to procure, digital services, I think government could make it a requirement that whoever is a vendor applying to ‑‑ for these services, they have to be UA ready.  They have to ensure and demonstrate in a given amount of time that they have not just a strategy for digital inclusion but a clear plan on when that will get implemented.  So it's a little bit of a ‑‑ I think governments and other organizations that have large purchasing power have influence have the ability to move this needle perhaps far more than just a campaign of persuasion.

>> CHRIS:  Thanks, Ram.  Interesting point.
Edmon, pick up on that given that you started the conversation about incentive.  And talk a bit about Ram's comments around being universal acceptance and specifically is there a standard that I could have, that I could add here to?  Are we working to create a stand that I could add here to and have a badge on my Web site that says, you know, I say standard whatever it is for universal acceptance?

>> Thank you, Chris.  And building on what Ram said I agree very much.  In fact, that's where I think at least it intersects with my belief nowadays after working for 20 years that we need a movement and that movement needs to have a push for a wider acceptance and digital inclusion is the right vehicle I believe for making this really happen and speak being universal acceptance, you had mentioned whether there are codes or standards.  I think the universal acceptance steering group which actually Ram and I got started did some work on it and has a definition for universal acceptance and some thresholds and criteria for different types of readiness and I think that's a very good starting point but coming back to its implementation it's an interesting thing.  I don't know Ram if you tried to sign up for the free brings bon airport Wifi, when I signed up it kicked out my.Asia e‑mail address and saying it was ‑‑

>> Kicked out my dot info address, my dot digital address so I ended up finally using my dot AU address.  Right.  So these are ‑‑

>> I slough used that in the first place, Ron.  You're in Australia.

>> Should have followed the country.

>> Just one second because that illustrates ‑‑ I think you could talk to this.  That illustrates a very important point which is that universal acceptance is not just about internationalized domain names.  It's actually about expanding the Internet and the use of the Internet beyond its original boundaries where it was just common and just two letter top level domains in the country code space and now there are proper words at the top level and IDNCCDLDs there are ‑‑ two characters.  I think this universal acceptance you suggested is not just about internationalized domain names, is it?

>> It definitely isn't although internationalized domain names and e‑mail addresses in their native language is a push I think that is what, you know, Ram said advertise it into digital inclusion and that's what you know I think is going to make it happen.  Of course, expanding the Internet name space is definitely important and on that point of native languages, I wanted to highlight one thing actually is that a lot of times think about domain names and addresses and think oh so they're just names, what you need for the multi lingual Internet and inclusion is actually content and services and so on.  So domain names is just one thing but I want to you know remind people that if you look at the history of the development of the Internet, e‑mail addresses and the domain name system was put in place in 1983.  1983 was when the domain name system was nut in place that was ASCII and English only it was already the Web was not invented until 1989, six years later.  So the point about the fires and domain name and e‑mail address system being ready makes for the foundation of content to then come today the Web still has almost 60 percent, 57 percent the last count of a content in English, building of people don't speak English or definitely not speak English in their native language, right?  But the majority of the Web is still English.  I think the fire system, the domain name system and e‑mail address system plays a role.  If we have the universal access ready and IDN and internationalized e‑mail addresses ready in the system, the content will have an infrastructure that it can be built on.  So I think they come hand in hand and the history can tell us something.

>> Fair enough.  And I think that's right.  I mean, it's all about bringing all of this together into one movement as you've said.
We talked a little bit about the policies.  You mentioned that a lot of the work over the last 20 years has been focusing on policies and you talked about the IDN policies looking at areas that are not necessarily covered in ASCII GTLDs.  Would you say, Ram, perhaps you could tackle this first, would you say that the IDN policies that are being put in place are there because necessary they don't apply to ‑‑ often don't apply to the GLT ‑‑ sorry to the ASCII GTLDs or is it because there's an opportunity to build it from the groundup properly knowing how these things are used now that actually the IDN policies better than ASCII GTLD?  I'm talking about things like variance because in an ASCII GTLD an I can be confused within a L.  They can be visually similar.

>> RAM:  Yeah I think because of the complexity of the language and expressing language in the DNS I agree with the premise that IDNTDL policies are more expressive of how humans actually communicate with each other as compared to ASCII GTLD policies there is still a ways to go but even the fact that you can accommodate both left to right and right to left languages that you can accommodate symbolic languages all of those things and the fact that in some of the languages as you said, Chris, what you write in one way or in one script is it means idol the same thing written in another script.  Chinese is a pretty good example of it and you need to find a way to tie the two of them together so there is not confusion.  So it's a much richer repertoire of policies in the IDNTLD world and the IDN world in general compared to the ASCII world.

>> I guess I'm ‑‑

>>EDMON:  Just to add on that, I don't think IDN policies add to that.  In fact, I think it's ‑‑ I think Ascii top level domains also address that I mean for ASCII TLDs but it's just not documented in a technical way or techno policy way.  It's the policy is to not have confusingly similar top level do mains so an I and an L changeable for the TLD will probably not be accepted as well.  But going back to I guess building what Ram said, it's really the kind of policies that is a linguistic and component, the one that I'm most familiar with is Chinese and there are different ways of writing a Chinese character.  It's almost like the capital letter A and the small letter A.  In the ASCII world, that's mapped together by, you know, technology standards.  Unfortunately, the IDN standards were unable to do that because it wasn't a straight forward one to one mapping.  Therefore, policies need to be put in place to map these, you know, basically same character back together and that's where those policies come into play.  So I don't think it's, you know, more or less.  I think the time it took was longer because the issues were more complex but I think we're ‑‑ I wouldn't say done with it because language is a living things but we are in a position that we can roll these things out.

>> RAM:  One thing interesting in all of this is much of the technological focus has been on written languages and I'm really intrigued, you know, when Jenny was talking about the oral languages and again there's a rich history there and it's not just those languages are endangered in the world, I think actually all oral languages unless there is some focus on it, I think all oral languages are a danger of being digitally erased because there is no method for oral languages to be expressed on the Internet other than transliteration into English or the lat constituent script.
And in Africa it's not even it is the Arabic script.

>> CHRIS:  Exactly.  And I think it's ‑‑ thank you for bringing that up, Ram.  Pat has put a comment into the chat which I think takes us into an area which I'd like us to wander into.  We've got about ten minutes left and we could go deep into the weeds on technical stuff but that's probably not desperately helpful and what Pat says in the chat is the question to me is how do you preserve cultures whose languages that are unwritten or include tonal characters such as the clicks in many African languages, how do you preserve those on the Internet?  Or even reconstitute extinct or near extinct languages such as Cornish in the south of England I think there are now about fewer than 300 speakers of Cornish.  Maybe we'll get to Jenny in a minute but Juliana let's start with you and say what are your thoughts about how could we work to preserve these cultures and languages unwritten on the Internet?  It's not internationalized domain names but it is about different languages and different ways of communicating?  Any thoughts how we could help to do that?

>> JULIANA:  I think Wikipedia and some community language related to Wikipedia is doing some working with the oral linguists who can ‑‑ for now who can translate into the digitalized or nonASCII could, we can do ‑‑ the technology is ready for the language can translate into the digital ‑‑ the Internet, so the documentation like the record it place it in Internet and scan script and they can plates the script and digitalize and record it into some Web site who people can learn and hearing what the local language but I think this is what in this language community do to preserve the data linguistic meanwhile waiting for the technical readiness where they can translate the language script into the Internet.

>> CHRIS:  Thanks, Juliana.  Jenny, do you think that the Internet can be a useful tool to help preserve some of the Indigenous lands the world including in Australia and is doing that simply by putting them into a written alpha Beth of use or would be better off to concentrate solely on the verbal and the sound?  What are your thoughts on that, Jenny?

>> So our transcribe have taken up technology very well.  Like they've got apps for the language.  So 23 years ago I learnt our language and at the time it was at such a state that I couldn't form sentences.  So‑so basically they just taught us some words and taught us how to research basically just you're on your own go and sort it out.  So even if I wanted to talk to other people and learn structures, I couldn't.  And I'm not really a speaker.  I understand some words but there's younger people now who have learnt the language from their old people and they teach now.  So if I ask them a question, they will respond to me with audio so they'll send me a Facebook message or a text with a recorded message in it so that I know the correct pronunciation and so that is a problem with technology as well with the apps and the Internet is that some of the words are mispronounced and so now they're being perpetuated in the wrong way so that all people don't even recognize their own language on the Internet because it's not right.

>> CHRIS:  Yeah, but clearly that said but clearly there is a role for memorializing and developing Indigenous spoken languages using the Internet as a dissemination tool be it through audio or through and/or through the written word.  Do you say that's right, there is a rule.

>> It is supposed to be a dissemination tool but people treat it like it's the be all and end all.  So if it's on the Internet then it must be the truth and that's tragic for language I think.

>> CHRIS:  Not just for languages for a whole heap of other things as well but yes, agreed.
All right.  We've got a few minutes left and I'd like to try to bring us back a little bit just to the sort of over arching IDN topic.  And I suppose my question is what do we think of the untapped opportunities that IDNs can help to realize, you know?  What ‑‑ if you think one thing that's sort of universal acceptance and the availability of IDN around the world could do?  One opportunity rather?  Do you have any ‑‑ does anyone have any thoughts about what that might be?  Ram.

>> RAM:  Thanks, Chris.  I think one of the untapped opportunities is the way humans interact and interface is still primarily through text.  You know, it's written in some way.  You have to type something into a browser or into an app and I think there's a great untapped opportunity in a greater role of voice and the spoken word and engageing and interacting with the Internet.  And what I mean is this today you can go to a search engine and you can speak into your phone and you can say ‑‑ ask it to search something and the search engine understands what to do about it but you cannot do the equivalent thing on the domain name system or using a Web site and I think there's a great untapped opportunity to be able to directly interact with the Internet as we know it the domain name system websites using the spoken word.

>> CHRIS:  Thank you that's a really interesting thought, sort of the Web.  Interesting.  Edmon, do you have any thoughts about untapped opportunity in the IDN world?

>>EDMON:  I can't agree with Ram more.  It would be very weird for a Japanese in Japan holding on his phone and trying to access a Web site and speaking English, right?  I mean, it is ‑‑ that's definitely a very important part.  Earlier I mentioned it's still the biggest area is to really level the field in terms of the content online.  Again, still almost 60 percent of the Web is English.  That's just not right.  It's not reflecting of the general culture and especially if you think about AI which is a hot topic and you think forward the machine learning looking at the Web today would obviously have bias, right?  If the world is not 68 percent English then that is simply fundamental bias so with I think the universal acceptance with internationalized domain names and e‑mail addresses in place I see that as unleashing the content of the Web to be in a more reflective of the demographics in the linguistic community around the world as well and that I think is a big opportunity and not just as a commercial opportunity but an opportunity for that kind of more multi cultural world view on the Web to actually happen.

>> Thank you very much.  I can't see the room so I don't know whether there's anybody in the room who wants to ask a question.  We have a couple of minutes left if there is somebody.

>> There is a hand raised.  Would you like to come to the microphone?

>> Just wondering whether this discussion is relevant at all.  I don't belong to this camp but let's assume the splinter net issue.  Do you think if that question ‑‑ do you think it would solve this whole problem?

>> CHRIS:  It's actually.  If you splinter it.

>> I actually think it's a good question.  In my view, not having a universal acceptance, not being able to put international domain names in place is part of splintering, fragmenting the Internet because then part of the Internet is not accessible or part of the people who speak a different language that they are not familiar with English, they are kept out.  That's a kind of fragmentation as well but if you talk about the fundamental fragmentation in terms of the infrastructure of the Internet, I think universal acceptance play an even more important role because without universal acceptance, the trust to the DNS, today we trust the DNS but in the world where, you know, universal acceptance is not well deployed then some of the domain e‑mail names can work here or not there that is a fundamental fragmentation of the Internet in my mind.

>> I think that's probably right, I'd also say it brings up the difference between words and in fact Jenny said naming is important.  Between fragmentation and the splinter net.  The splinter net, the fragmentation is a much wider problem to deal with because it can be fragmented and you can't have access to it, that means it's fragmented and so on.  Whereas splinter net I'm just going to take mine and go away from the main thing but a very interesting question I think.  We are rapidly running out of time here.  I think this has been a really interesting discussion and that is 100 percent down to you four.  So perhaps the audience in the room and those online could join me in thanking Juliana, Jenny, Ram, and Edmon for their contributions today and I hope everybody has enjoyed the panel.  Thank you very much indeed.

>> And I just have a couple of housekeeping notes now putting my APR hat on.  So this session is over but the next session that will happen here in this room is the town hall.  So please bring the discussion that we just had back to the sin they sis document is a very important vehicle for A APrIGF.  You can also check the online the comments.APrIGF.Asia and the town hall will start at 1600.  That's 4:00 p.m. which means in 20 minutes time.  So see you all in 20 minutes.
>> Recording stopped.

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