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The Use of Alphabets Other Than Latin (Roman) on the Internet and Its Impact on Building a True Knowledge Society. Legal Informatics & E-Governance as tools for the Knowledge Society LEFIS Seminar, Reykjavik (Iceland), July 12-13, 2007. Oleksandr Pastukhov MPhil (Koretsky Institute)
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The Use of Alphabets Other Than Latin (Roman) on the Internet and Its Impact on Building a True Knowledge Society Legal Informatics & E-Governance as tools for the Knowledge SocietyLEFIS Seminar, Reykjavik (Iceland), July 12-13, 2007 Oleksandr Pastukhov MPhil (Koretsky Institute) LL.M. (Northwestern)
Introduction • Global Reach: 64.8%of global Internet audience is English-speaking (2004) • comScore Networks: ~14 of the 694 mln Internet users worldwide are in the U.S. (2006), down from ~2/3 a decade ago • 45 mln of ~255 bln people living in the U.S. don’t speak English at home (2000 census) • ITU: 25 of the world’s “wired” population come from China, Japan, India, S. Korea(2006)
Understandable Addresses Needed! • American Standard Code for Information Interchange(ASCII): 26 letters, 10 digits, dot[.] and hyphen [/] • Others: Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai, Hindi, Han ideographs, … • Language variations, dialects, reforms • Diacritic signs: [é], [å], [ñ], [ç], [ü], …
Technical Solutions • Unicode: ~1 mln characters – 1991 • Dr. Tan Tin Wee – 1998 • Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC)– June 2000 • VeriSign: IDN Testbed (32 scripts covering 350 languages) – Nov. 2000 • Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): 4 RFCs – Dec. 2002, March 2003
Progress • i-DNS.netand RegTime.netlaunched .ком, .нет, .орг– May 2001 • RegTime.net launched .ру – June 2003; .бг, .уа – coming soon • i-DNS.netand CNNIC launched “.zhongguo” (“.china”),“.gongsi” (“company”), “.wangluo” (“networking”) – Oct. 2004 • ICANN 28th Annual Meeting (San Juan, Puerto Rico) – June 25-26, 2007
Problems • Access to knowledge • Cultural sovereignty/chauvinism • Cultural imperialism & trade expansion • Politics: PRC v. Taiwan & Diaspora • Internet fragmentation: PRC v. ICANN • Cybersquatting: kcepokc.py – xерох.ком • Resolvement – RFCs are not enough
Looking Forward • “Mixed” IDNs: www.mötleycrew.us, www.toysяus.com, www.папараzzи.уа • “Internationalized” e-mail: саша@лекс.бг • Whois operational in any language • Internet governance: the future of ICANN • ADR: UDRP for personal names, trade names, geographical indications?
For more information • www.minc.org • www.cyrlinc.org • www.i-dns.net • www.webnames.ru • www.iname.ua/cyrillic.php • www.icann.org/idn • www.unicode.org
Questions? Comments? alex.pastukhov@clict.net alex.pastukhov@lex.bg