The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. 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 to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Okay. Now we're on. Thank you. Can we have everyone sit as close as possible to the table? That way we see each other when we ask questions and answers and make all the nice comments.
Today I will be very brief and leave it to my colleagues here and open up to this dialogue we have. Obviously, we're trying to build from the universality of Internet. As you know, UNESCO organized recently the conference called connecting the dots. This conference actually brought the conclusion of four basic principles to understand Internet, but also in a way for the states to follow‑up on their own policies and to challenge their own policies and eventually measure their own policies with the specific indicators we're trying to develop.
These are known as the ROAM principles. This was the ROAM principles, which I think are fundamental. The rights oriented in the plenary this morning and why this should be a human rights oriented approach. We talked about openness, the Internet should not belong to any particular sector, whether academic or non‑academic, developed nations or developing nations or Internet should be open to everyone and hopefully free, especially for educational purposes or for people with disability or other resources.
We believe in the openness and all the resources put at the service of humanity. Accessibility, we insisted it should be universal. The proposal is everyone should be able to have access to Internet, and I'll come back to that. Because sometimes because of rural areas or the distance, it's easy to see some don't have access and some have access.
What is the differentiation, and how much can the State invest in the infrastructure for guaranteeing access to everyone. In the multi‑stakeholder this morning together with the human rights patrolman to develop a policy of Internet that maintains the of interest of all sectors. In the axis, we're trying to base ourselves in the SDGs, the 17 SDGs, we believe that the ICT and the positive use of Internet is essential for all the development agenda it's upon the for education and gender equality and it's important for protecting cultural heritage and libraries.
It is important in the infrastructure guarantees for civility, but in particular we were looking at Goal 16, where as we said this morning Goal 16 gives us the basic conditions for development, which is to establish societies in peace, inclusiveness, access to justice, transparency and public access to information.
Now, this final phrase is the key to what we're going to open up the discussion now. We are trying to see states that guarantee public access to information in this record. Public should mean universality. We're trying to have access to everyone, meaning the entire public. So with no exclusion.
And this is part of the inclusiveness of the societies. Societies that work for all majority of population and minority population for all different social sectors, ethnic groups, cultures, languages, economic origins, or ideological and political ideas. Everyone should have equal rights and, therefore, equal access to communicate and to use the Internet.
The second one is public access to information is connectivity.
Access means guaranteeing connectivity for everyone. Connectivity guarantees equal use of broadband. Not different qualities or stratifying the qualities. Everyone has equal capacity to use the broadband, and it would reach all the populations. Finally access to information means we need relevant information in this accessibility. This is a point I'm not going to develop.
We talked about it already. We have always said that for development we have to guarantee connectivity, but we have to guarantee the relevant knowledge and content that serves society. This is how we're trying to build knowledge societies and have every single community receive the information they need for appropriating the development programs and implementing.
With the idea of guaranteeing public access of information and the universality of the Internet, I will open up this process. I will leave it to my two colleagues here, Guy Berger and Anriette, and we have our first presentation from ant Rhett who has been a big example of inclusiveness of universality because they expanded their work across the word and to have a gender sensitive approach for Internet for which we congratulate them.
Anriette.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you very much for that, Frank. It's quite a challenging assignment to reflect on burning issues on the second to the last day of the IGF. What I want to do is actually look at the ROAM principles and the UNESCO principles and pick on what I think some of the challenges could be. Firstly, human rights. Looking at the Internet and making sure development, deployment and uptick is it human‑rights based is backing increasingly challenging. On the one hand we have the recognition of the Internet as an enabler. There's more formal recognition by governments through resolutions at the human rights council and regional bodies as well.
We also have more making of legislation by states to fill the legal loopholes that exist to actually legalize some of the rights violations, which they have been practicing. So there's at the moment a proliferation of security and surveillance legislation, which is formalizing the privacy violations done informally. I think that's very challenging.
I think we're also beginning to see how the Internet is not just an enabler of rights but can also be a contributor for its use to the disabling of rights. The proliferation of hate speech, of bullying, of use of the Internet for false news, for example. And for mobilizing xenophobia. That's challenging for UNESCO in its approach to digital literacy and education, to not just look at the positive aspect of the Internet, but also enable the institutions and communities and people and journalists that UNESCO works with to respond to this ‑‑ the harmful impacts potentially of the Internet.
Secondly, on openness, I think the potential is, of course, really important, but we have to explore what we mean by open and what our understanding is of the openness of the Internet. For example ‑‑ I'm quoting David sitting in the room here, he questions the notion of permitting information.
Are we perhaps not at a point where we need to look at protecting human rights? To have more regulation? Not regulation to restrict use of the Internet but, in fact, to secure the rights that we hope that the Internet can enable.
I think that's very challenging, because regulation can have harmful impacts. It can increase cost. It can also create rules that then have to be implemented and complied with. I do think when it comes to the protection of rights in particular, rights such as privacy and freedom of expression, we're not going to have that unless we actually regulate corporate behavior in many respects and also increase the extent to which governments are being held accountable for not violating rights.
So by openness here I mean or by challenging the notion of openness, I think perhaps we are at a stage where we need to face the fact to keep the Internet open in the way that we like it to be open, we might need more regulation.
Accessibility, I think there's so much potential at the moment, and this IGF has really the theme of community networks has stood out, and I think that's very significant. The notion that technology has developed, and people's awareness have developed in such a way that people are able to take control of their own lack of access, communities.
Community institutions, be they schools or libraries can take on this project of providing connectivity, and doing it in a way that increases agencies, that strengthens other developmental and cultural and educational processes in the community. I think that's a very exciting moment for us to be in. I don't think UNESCO needs to talk about what the mobile industry is doing.
UNESCO can engage with these locally driven bottom‑up community networks this allows UNESCO to look at connectivity from a point of view that cuts across work areas. Building resilience, strengthening education, recognizing cultural heritage as well as new cultures. I think that's important. This is an interesting thing. We also are beginning to learn we can't take it for granted. That just having multi‑stakeholder as a check boxer and size not getting the depth of dialogue and engagement between stakeholder groups that we need.
I think UNESCO is very good at that, and I think you have the ability to bring stakeholders together in a particular way that has worked well. I hope you can do a lot more than that, and I think one of your strengths is that you don't just work with Civil Society, business, governments and technical community. I think and the people in this room your work with the media is, I think, very significant.
Not just with the media, but with different aspects of the community media, with citizen media, with broadcasting and print journalism. Looking at the media in a more diversified or disaggregated way and engaging the media in this way. Looking at media's sustainability as well in the context of the Internet is also something that UNESCO can do that can make a big difference.
I think the challenge that cuts across all these principles is that I think we still have contested ideas about what the Internet is, and is it a public utility? Is it a public good? You know, we talk a lot about the principles that we can use to guide Internet Governance.
I do think Cedric asked me to reflect on the net 1DL. I think the net 1DL principle was a good and quite effective attempt at coming up with principles that capture what the Internet is and how it should be governed. It might be worth revisiting that, and I think that that's certainly something in the context of your ROAM work to look at that multi‑stakeholder position again.
What are the principles? How do we approach the Internet? How do we see the Internet? Is it just a case of bringing different stakeholder groups together and thrashing out what their different approaches are, or do we need some kind of common understanding of what it is that the Internet is as a public entity or public good? Then we brought the multi‑stakeholder decision‑making based on those principles rather than just having this kind of contested, ongoing dialogue. That's not really grounded on commonly agreed principles.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Anriette. I'm sure in the discussion that follows, we will have further comments from my colleagues at UNESCO and people in the audience. What we wanted to do now, though, was just to take a bit more of the presentation part of this workshop before we come to more of a discussion.
So we've ‑‑ the actual segue and you know what we mean by openness and multi‑stakeholders and what is the basic assumption of the Internet. These last principles of the ROAM, which were accepted by the member states is a normative principles. How do you make them effective in terms of social policy and people's work on the ground. One of the ways to do this is to interpret those principles as indicators and they can say and there's a multi‑stakeholderism, and then you said Anriette in a more superficial way or not at all. INTIC already Internet‑related decision‑making.
UNESCO is starting this process. We have consulted in international meetings, but now we really are commencing an 18‑month project to develop the indicators which requires unpacking these four concepts because you can't find indicators if you don't actually have an understanding of them.
So we will in the next 18 months have a lot of regional consultations. We will have an online platform as well, and finally out of that we hope to come with the indicators, and then we will pilot them in three countries, and then we will go back and look at the indicator and say, do we need to prove this indicator further? After that whole process we go along to UNESCO member states and say, look, these things can actually give you a grip on key aspects of the Internet which are critical for the universality.
The rights for the multi‑stakeholder, and, of course, it's complex how our society is dealing with privacy, how they deal with freedom of expression. In the rat's chamber as well as other rats. You have to figure out the rat. The economic and social rats becomes quite interesting in the question.
Openness, which covers the openness you referred to Anriette, but other open aspects of open data, open education resources and open opportunities to participate in the Internet in terms of the permission of this innovation story. Even playing fields. When you come to the accessibility, one of the key things there is media and information literacy. How do you assess society's progress in terms of media information, and lastly the multi‑stakeholder thing.
I've introduced this Internet indicator project, and we have a person here who will give us feedback on the project even before we've launched it. This is Anri van der Spuy over here, and we asked her to comment because she has a bit more in‑depth information than I've been able to present in this short discussion here. She's also, in addition to commenting now, she's doing some specific work supported by a UNESCO ICANN and ISOC trying to unpack this multi‑stakeholder question. That will be very useful to get a grip on what are the key indicators for assessing multi‑stakeholderism.
So I'm going to ask her not only for her point of the view the work she's doing in multi‑stakeholder unpacking, but to tell us what her view is of this overall endeavor to take these great principles and make them into recognized standards people can use that have the backing of a UNESCO member state framework to assess key Internet issues in their country.
Anri, over to you.
>> ANRI VAN DER SPUY: Thanks. If these indicators ‑‑ I don't want to preempt them, but if these indicators are anything close to the media development indicators that they developed in 2007 or '08, it will take us far to take the ROAM principles and make sure the gaps are on full legislation and the decisions that take us the wrong way of the track. Anriette mentioned around the multi‑stakeholder principle that we shouldn't take it for granted, and that's something if you look at the literature around multi‑stakeholder governance over the past ten years is something repeatedly mentioned.
In the beginning we were optimistic about this new way of looking at Internet Governance. As you look at newer things that people are writing, there seems to be increasingly concerns about whether we're going the right way with the microgovernance. The problem is the messy consequences of some of these processes lead to things like legislation and other things being used to stop gaps. I think that's one of the big reasons why something like indicators can strengthen this process and can prevent this from happening.
Earlier in week we did a focus group to help support this project on multi‑stakeholder governance and learning more from the past ten years in multi‑stakeholder governance. One of the focus groups focused on the Marcus Brazil civil rights framework for Internet Governance and the Internet.
While we would gather a few good examples of things that work in multi‑stakeholder governance and make it more effective, it became quite clear it's not just a tool towards ‑‑ it's something that we have to continue working on, and that's why I think indicators are so useful in this field, especially if you look at what's happening in Brazil around what's happened and other similar movements. So it's important, and it's timely that we take this debate further and don't just keep on talking about multi‑stakeholder governance and make it be an ism in a mantra. I look forward to the indicators and I hope they're as effective as the media development indicators were or still are.
>> GUY BERGER: We just move on to the last half of the presentations here. Just before I leave the indicators for this moment, we've had some interesting challenges from people here about to what extent all these indicators are going to be gender‑sensitive and age‑sensitive.
So that's very interesting. At the same time, we've also got, of course, to decide if you it are going to have an indicator or net neutrality, how you understand that and how you impact the complexity of that into a total package of indicators, which is not 5,000 different indicators. This has to be realistic, and it's got to be focused on the key patterns that really need to be assessed.
What's important, though, is that the idea of these indicators is that you get a holistic perspective of the state of the main Internet development questions in a country in our view, and particularly folks on the issues of UNESCO's area of work.
Now, in terms of what I said about this holistic thing, I want to move onto my last remarks, and then I'll hand over to Indrajit Banerjee, my colleague. We're pleased to launch today this new study, okay, which is free online, and you can download it. It is, in fact, this this brochure that you have.
This is a study ‑‑ I'm just going to give you a taste of it. It shows the complexity of this RAM, which sounds very nice. When you go into it, there are a lot of interrelationships. It looks at privacy and freedom of expression, okay? Now you have two rights. In terms of these two rights, if you take freedom of expression, it has two dimensions, as we know. The freedom to impart and freedom to receive, to seek and receive.
Already you have to look at rights in terms of the complexity of those two different moments because they have different ‑‑ one is about, for example, press. Freedom and the right to publish. Another one is about your right to access information.
Then you have the value kind of connected to the right to receive information, the value of transparency. You have that package there, and then you have privacy.
The key question is what happens when transparency intrudes on privacy? What happens when freedom of expression intrudes on reputation, for example? What you start to face here is how does a society balance the different rights, okay?
What's very interesting about this study is it says ‑‑ it goes into the complexity of these balancing acts. How do you make the compromises but keep as much of the integrity as each right as you can? In other words, any limitation of the one in interest with another has to be proportionate in law and for a legitimate purpose.
What this public indication argues, when you do the balancing, not enough for the tests. You're talking about the Internet, so what is your decision‑making in these spheres mean for the openness of the Internet and the accessibility of the Internet, and are you doing this balancing in a multi‑stakeholder fashion?
So that begins to show you that these four rats are not just ‑‑ these four components of ROAM not just parallel but they're related. Each of the spheres is particularly complex. Jon whether ‑‑ let me give you a little taste of what's in here in this publication. By the way, I should just give credit this publication was supported by the Netherlands, and the authors include Joe who started this before he was the U.N.'s special rapporteur on privacy. At any rate, let me give you very quickly some of the conclusions about this.
It says part of the balancing is that when you balance, you need to include considerations, for example, privacy, enhancing technologies, privacy by technology design and that's part of the balancing of other rights.
It speaks about the importance of applying a human rights framework with due regard to foreign citizens, which as you know, this is a very tricky question, particularly with data in transfer. So it goes into some assessment of that. It calls on companies or proposes companies should follow higher standards of international human rights protection, and that they should improve their self‑regulation and current regulation in terms of how they ‑‑ their own transparency and how they balance transparency on their platforms with other values and other rights. Lastly, of course, they say what I just said. You've got to look at how all these four pillars are related to each other.
So that's our new publication. We recommend it, too, and watch the space. We will have some more wonderful studies coming in 2017, including the multi‑stakeholder analysis. So I think that concludes with me at the moment. Actually, I see that our colleague Cedric suggests at this point before we introduce this, we should have discussion on this ‑‑ on the session ‑‑ on the issues raised so far, because that makes sense.
Indrajit is going to speak about a rather different kind of work done by UNESCO. Could we throw it open to say 5 or 10 minutes of discussion on the issues raised up until now. Please, who would like to make a comment. I'll have to call on people like David Souter to give us his ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE: Let me make a question about multi‑stakeholder principles and how they move forward, because it seems to me that there were developed in a very ‑‑ from the very early days of the Internet. The Internet was about small groups of people that have particular technical expertise working together in order to do certain things as a collective enterprise. We're now talking about something that is the biggest communication medium in the world and has impacts across every aspect of our economy, society and cultures. That's an enormous change.
It would be astonishing really if the way in which people did multi‑stakeholder activities way back in the early '80s still worked for this enormously different thing today. The two challenges it seems to me or two important here is firstly, how do we differentiate multi‑stakeholderism from the meeting that everybody takes part? What is dynamically different about it?
Secondly, with the transition of the Internet into a primarily, I would argue, commercial environment, how do we distinguish it or stop it from being public/private partnership. I'll throw those up and see if anyone comments on those.
>> ANRI VAN DER SPUY: I might disagree with you a little bit, David. Yes, it's new. It's different. It has changed, but I think there's some fundamental principles in public participation and public participation and policy‑making that we should be using when we talk about multi‑stakeholder participation. So I think we don't always have to look for new things and new indicators. I think that there are also some older existing indicators to look at. I do think that the Nick Monday Dell statements is a useful place to start, because I think it sets down some of the fundamental principles such as accountability, transparency, participation.
It also problemizes something like respective roles and responsibilities for those familiar with the agenda. Many governments still have this understanding in the policy‑making process, different stakeholders have fixed responsibilities. Governments have a responsibility to make the policy. Civil Society introduces the community perspective.
You know, business perspective, and I think what the Nick Wandell statement says the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders will vary according to the actual topic and discussion. That's very useful.
I do agree with you, David. I think there has to be a nuanced approach, because a multi‑stakeholder process covers a very vast array of type of processes from consultation to decision‑making. From standard settings in industry to public policy‑making at a national level already.
So I do think that a departure point should be recognizing that diversity. Don't even try to ‑‑ maybe it's a two‑phased approach. Looking at generic principles but looking for indicators, I think you have to look at the different types of processes. Finally, I think what the indicator should be shouldn't be measuring whether the processes are multi‑stakeholder or not. It should measure whether they are really inclusive.
Are they accountable? Are they transparent? Do they reflect and respect power imbalances, and particularly, you know, that of the powerless or power‑week in this decision. That's what we want to measure. Not whether it was multi‑stakeholder or not.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you so much. We have another comment over there.
>> AUDIENCE: Just a phrase, and then Indrajit.
>> GUY BERGER: Can you introduce yourself?
>> AUDIENCE: Sorry. (Indiscernible) and we're working with community networks. How can we build an Internet of citizens and not only consumers? Is there a phrase to think because when we connect in networking in the community, we were talking about neighbors, and when we connect in the provider, a commercial provider you're a client.
I want to make this phase 2 to think and how can we build in commercial Internet a model that approaches more of the people and not only put them on like as a client? This is the point. Thanks.
>> GUY BERGER: We'll take one or two responses and we can give you a response. Anybody else here? Come on. UNESCO is asking for your advice. Please ‑‑ or your criticism or comments. Nobody? Okay. So we'll just do what we want to do.
Okay. I think you've raised a very key challenge. Okay. Let me quickly respond, and then we'll ask these people. To what extent in this model of ROAM and the indicators can we assess those questions and does it fit into their framework? That's a great challenge for us, and we have to try and do that.
It does, to some extent, relate or so I think not only but it relates in part to the question of multi‑stakeholder analysis, because the question is the whole ‑‑ and understanding of multi‑stakeholder is that the Internet shouldn't be dominated or captured by any particular actor, neither governments or companies or techies or academics.
He doesn't want philosophy kings over the Internet and not Civil Society. The whole point about the stakeholders say this is a public resource, and therefore, no single force should dominate. You precisely raised the question, what happens when commercial companies are there with their products, and people are not themselves the producers?
This is a very interesting thing. It partially can be addressed by the multi‑stakeholderism, but it's a key question and we should answer it perhaps in the other pillars as well. Thank you.
Let's get final comments from the good friends and move on to the last part.
>> I want to add about the media development indicator as a model here. I used the media development indicators with Toby and people from UNESCO years ago looking at a particular country, and I found it an extremely useful way to force me and a my colleagues the media environment and closing examine the impact on what I knew about and knew less about it. It was from my point of view a satisfactory model to use. So I was thinking about maybe it's worth as part of your development of these indicators exploring the experience of those who have used media development indicators as tools and try to replicate the positivity that I'm trying to express here.
>> GUY BERGER: Anriette, last words to you.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks. What she said around the importance of the user is clear in the past week to me of being involved and connecting the next million, which is being presented tomorrow. I think a lot of debates tends to forget that side of it. Forget the side of the user and see them as a consumer. It's vital to this conversation, and unfortunately that's probably the most difficult stakeholder group to really give voice to. So it's, you know, certainly something to look at in developing this study around modest stakeholder governance, and we'll certainly be speaking more for the Brazilians in this regard because it's something they've done so well. Thanks.
I think that this is a useful exercise. I think that it's important, I think, to develop the indicators in an inclusive way. Then they're meaningful. I think the way David mentioned the media for development indicators, those were developed with the participation of media actors, and that will apply to all the indicators. They'll be used more, and they'll be more meaningful if people that are affected by those issues are part of the development process. I think the challenging thing about the Internet is that yes, on the one hand it's ‑‑ it is turning everyone into consumers, but then people are also consumers because there is so much commercialization.
I think that's a challenge for us. How do we look at human rights but actually consumer rights is also an area relevant to the Internet. Maybe that's not for UNESCO to do, but maybe that's what regulatory agencies can do or should take on board. Many developing countries have got very poorly developed consumer rights protections. Then also to problemize that because what we see with Internet commercial platforms is this development of the idea of informed consent, and I think that's a very dangerous notion because that is implying that by consenting and ticking of books, you are, in fact, signing away your rights, and you've done it properly.
So to come back to not just giving the individual the ability to sign away their human rights, particularly their privacy, means we need to look ‑‑ it's the point I made earlier. We need to look at what regulatory constraints is necessary to prevent this kind of rampant violation of rights that's part of Internet business models, so I think we need to ‑‑ unpleasant as it is we need to look at regulatory intervention needed and how do we hold business actors accountable for the violation.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you, everybody. We really invite you to join us as we begin to unfold the consultations around these indicators, and even more we invite you to run with these indications when they're finally finalized and use them. The whole point is to try and improve Internet in your countries.
With that, I think the first part of this workshop is finished, and I'll hand over to my colleague, Indrajit Banerjee who will speak about the work in universal access and multilingualism and afterwards Mr. Giovanni Seppia from EURid comment and we'll open it up for discussion. I understand jet.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: It's great to be here. It's in our own forum. It's good to see people are still here at the IGF.
Day.
I think let me make a connection directly with what Guy just spoke about in the Internet indicators project but also what Mr. Frank La Rue talked about in terms of Internet universality and their own principles. There is a very direct connect so when Guy says there are two parts, it doesn't mean that it is connected. In fact, I would suggest that when we talk about Internet universality, apart from the principles and underlying concepts, what is essential and central to Internet universality is the core belief of the United Nations systems as a whole, no one should be left behind.
That's essentially whoever talks about universality talks about all inclusiveness and so that's a given in our conception of the whole thing. Now, I've been asked to speak about something specific.
I wouldn't cover all the different topics because we don't have the time. I focus on the issue of multilingualism as they're increasing key determinants of empowerment, and we know that languages are absolutely essential for the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. Language is fast disappearing. I don't want to go into the statistics, but about half of the languages that exist today will be gone by the end of the century.
I think it is important to understand that being able to use one's language on the Internet is part of how you participate fully in societies. UNESCO has always considered that cultural diversity and multilingualism play a key role in inclusive societies.
Now, it's also very clear if you scan through recent research that the Internet holds an enormous potential in terms of promoting the languages, learning languages, protecting language and revitalizing language. UNESCO believes that language playing a role in the free flow of information to the world which is one of our core mandates. This won't happen if everyone's voices aren't heard and your languages are essential and critical.
I will not go into the detailed presentation of the quite unprecedented project that UNESCO just launched, which is called the world atlas of languages. It's an extension of an atlas we launched in 1993 call the atlas of languages that still exists and the first edition of the atlas of languages is in danger. It was published in 1996. In 2001 we had a second edition and in 2008 a fully revised edition.
Although there we noticed far too many languages were disappearing, and in 2001 800 languages were listed, and you can imagine what the situation is today. We believe that perhaps expanding the atlas languages Wilbert reflect the global linguistic diversity and the situation of languages around the world, and, of course, play a critical role in preserving, because all languages will not survive.
That's a fact of life. It's a cultural tradition that disappears and everything disappears one day. At least if possible document, record, preserve languages which are about to die.
So increasing linguistic diversity around the world better respond to the inclusive ICTs and promoting languages. Developing scalable ICT models to expand access to multilingual education and knowledge, and therefore the development of the world atlas of languages will stimulate collaboration through awareness raising the campaigning and we're setting up networks around the world of linguists and so on to take it forward.
It gives me great pleasure we may have a discussion after Mr. Giovanni Seppia's presentation. We will ask him to do his brief presentation, because UNESCO and EURid published a report on domain names and they play an important role and it's a gateway because it creates a base on which then multilingual content can be placed on the Internet. So Giovanni, the floor is yours.
>> GIOVANNI SEPPIA: Thank you so much, Indrajit. This is a presentation I gave that I can quickly go through. It's an honor to partner with UNESCO and also to provide this for the first time in year is a truly online rapporteur.
Instead of having the paper version, what we wanted to achieve this year was to launch the online version of the rapporteur, and to make sure that from now we regularly update the IDN rapporteur so it doesn't become one publication at the end of each year but it's
regular work done throughout the year.
All right. Thank you. The main names are correctly slated out of a sort of gateway for linguistic diversity, promoting it online. Currently internationalized names are just 2% of the worldwide register domain names. If you ‑‑ if we look at the three main scripts that we find today in the worldwide web, we see that the proceed dominance is Latin script followed by hand script and southeasterly script.
This is a map of the languages that are spoken in the different countries against IDNs, and IDNs rapporteur shows that reflected most of the time the languages spoken in those countries. There have been a lot of things going on during 2016. The main one being that there's been quite a lot of progress as for universal acceptance of IDNs, and to make it very simple, each of us should have the right and the power to express themselves in his own language and making sure that at the moment I'm expressing myself by an e‑mail and website online.
This is well recognized by old browsers, so there are nobody here for linguistic diversity, although universal acceptance made great progress to, let's say, contain those improved and this is thanks to great collaboration within the technical community. To sum up, as I said, IDNs are a great help for linguistic diversity in cyberspace and also IDNs are accurate predictors of a domain name.
There's a lot of work that has been done, and IDNs can help also with the endangered language because an endangered language that may be ‑‑ may be disappearing in a few years can survive thanks to IDNs, thanks to having a space online on the worldwide web.
Indeed, all the work that is done, which at some point is quite technical, is a work that will serve to announce linguistic and cultural diversity I don't line. Thank you. This is the rapporteur under our dot com.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: This is a fascinating report. It will give insight, and can you put back the slide of the world map. How do you read this format in terms of all the totally empty spaces in all of Africa.
>> GIOVANNI SEPPIA: There are some spaces that are not available. So for most of ‑‑ I'm sorry. So for many countries where you see just gray it's because they're unfortunately not available. We cannot really track what kind of IDNs are present in those countries.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: I also say that three scripts have 90% of the IDNs, and how do you explain that?
>> GIOVANNI SEPPIA: We're talking about internationalized domain names both at the top level and second level. So before and after the last dot when you type a domain name. In this case the predominant of IDNs is from the so‑called Latin extended scripts, so they are there.
They belong to the Latin extended script. So a large part of the IDNs belong to the Latin scripter followed by the hand scripter, which is proceed dominantly in Asia and then the script and the Russian community has developed and has done a lot of work to promote Russian domain names both at the second and top level.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: Go for the slide where you show the breakdown of the scripts. What about the very tiny parcels? What are those scripts?
>> GIOVANNI SEPPIA: Those are other scripts like the great one, so all the scripts have been analyzed in the IDN rapporteur, and again, we are referring to the scripts on the second level and at the top level.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: Thank you, Giovanni. I open the discussion to the floor if you have any questions on what I said and Giovanni's presentation of the report. Anyone? Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Just a quick question. Do you have any idea why Colombia is a different color from the other countries of Latin America?
>> GIOVANNI SEPPIA: That's ‑‑ it's mixed in there. Yes. It's mixed. Again, Colombia, of course, the language is Spanish‑based, and that just depends on how much the local registry has implemented the IDNs and which IDNs the registry has implemented. Again, there are different levels ‑‑ different sets of IDNs like Latin or Latin extended or Latin extended versions, too, so it depends much about this.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: Any other comments? Yes, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. I'm from Japan. I conducted a survey on how much users pay for registering a domain name under IDN, TLD or other ASCII‑labeled TLDs. I found open people pay more for IND registrations rather than ASCII‑based registrations. My finding is a preliminary one, so I can't guarantee that people pay more for IDN. I think there's a certain need for internationalized domain names so we have to find out a better way to foster or nurture the demands or requirements of the registrants so that we may have more IDN flourishing in the end. Thank you.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: Thank you so much. It's a valid point. We investigated it as well in this study that we've run for six years. We have seen that IDNs in most of the worldwide regions like Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, there's not a matter of pry difference. But awareness of the end users, because many of them are somehow spoiled by using the standard, let's say ‑‑ lack of the standard scripts, so at that point they're not, let's say, tempted or challenged or they're not looking forward to use their own language when they look for a domain name. So I think most of the work has to be done on education and awareness of the end user.
Thank you. If there are no other comments, I would like to pass the mic back to ‑‑ again.
>> AUDIENCE: Just a quick comment. My colleague is completely right. This is not separate from the earlier part, because this is exactly part of the discussion of accessibility.
>> INDRAJIT BANERJEE: I pass the Mike back to Mr. Frank La Rue to present us his concluding remarks.
>> FRANK LA RUE: Well, there's not going to be any other questions, we would certainly encourage you to read this report online. All the comments are always welcome, please, and suggestions to follow‑up reports as well. We will be very open to all your suggestions. We hope that these reports will also be very useful for all of you. Thank you very much.
(Session concluded at 18:06 CT)