The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was held in Athens, Greece,
on 30 October – 2 November, 2006.
IFG was aimed at discussing the main issues of managing the Internet such as affordability and availability of the Internet; interconnection costs and security; management of critical resources and technology transfer; multilingualism and local development of software, etc. All of these is supposed to promote Internet stability, reliability, safety and development.
IGF structure included eight sessions, which can be divided into four main groups:
• Openness
• Security
• Diversity
• Access
As non-English-speaking Internet users, we got interested in the Diversity session where they discussed the issue of national domain names. One of the challenges we face is to develop Internationalized Domain Names, or IDNs, while preserve the security and stability of the domain name system. Thus, one of the essential points dealt with using logins and how such means could be used to present or process domain names in national languages at DNS sublevels. From the user’s point of view, the language question reduces to what they type or see on the screen, but is not about the information in DNS or a visible form of the URL address, so the problem is not how the technologies work, but “what a user should see (or input) and the best ways to achieve multilingualism”. Will this come true soon? Technologies will show.