Description: The Internet must be multilingual to be inclusive. This means the domain names and email addresses we use to navigate and communicate online must also be multilingual – called internationalized domain names (IDNs) and email addresses. In 2005 the WSIS Tunis Agenda committed to the "multilingualization of the Internet", noting the importance of implementing multilingualism in domain names and email addresses. ICANN's global multistakeholder community has deployed 150 top-level domains (TLDs) in 37 languages in 23 scripts. Today we see internationalized domain names, e.g. Thai ยูเอทดสอบ.ไทย, and email addresses, e.g. Japanese めーるてすと@どこでもつかえる.みんな. The new gTLD program continues and is at the heart of the ICANN and its community's plans to introduce more IDN TLDs in the coming years. Despite progress, Universal Acceptance (UA) of domain names and email addresses by Internet applications and services remains a challenge. For example, Arabic email addresses cannot be used to register for a social media application. Less than 10% of popular national or global websites and 23% of deployed email servers are configured to accept email addresses in all local languages, according to ICANN community studies. The ICANN community is working with partners such as UNESCO to address these issues. The session brings together key stakeholders to discuss why Universal Acceptance of domain names and email addresses still presents ongoing challenges. The session will highlight the measures and collaboration needed to enable adoption of UA, and the roles of different stakeholders, including governments, technical community, academia, and civil society, for achieving this goal. The session will also discuss how the governments could use their digital inclusion programs to measure the progress on UA to indicate their progress towards promoting multilingualism for an inclusive Internet.
Open Zoom
