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UNESCO strongly advocates for a multilingual Internet that would ensure universal access to information and knowledge as well as cultural diversity on cyberspace.
Over the last decade, the Internet has had an increasing impact on social, political and economic life. The tremendous development of the Internet brought the attention of the international community to its structural functioning and public multidimensional implications, broadly described as ‘Internet Governance’.
While UNESCO has been continuously promoted the development and dissemination of multilingual content on cyberspace through the Initiative B@bel, most recently, the Organization agreed to tackle issue related to multilingual addressing and access to cyberspace.
During the Internet Governance Forum, held in Rio de Janeiro in November 2007, UNESCO, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) agreed to collaborate on global efforts to build universal standards for multilingual addressing and access to cyberspace.
One fundamental issue concerns the development of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), the Internet domain names that could contain letters with diacritics, such as accent marks, or characters from non-Latin scripts. Currently the Top Level Domains, for example “.org" or “.fr”, can contain only Latin scripts.
A considerable work has been undertaken by ICANN to develop IDNs in particular for the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). UNESCO supports this development by ensuring that all Member States are fully aware of the issues arising from the development of IDNs and engaged in the policy debate within the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN.
While UNESCO has been continuously promoted the development and dissemination of multilingual content on cyberspace through the Initiative B@bel, most recently, the Organization agreed to tackle issue related to multilingual addressing and access to cyberspace.
During the Internet Governance Forum, held in Rio de Janeiro in November 2007, UNESCO, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) agreed to collaborate on global efforts to build universal standards for multilingual addressing and access to cyberspace.
One fundamental issue concerns the development of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), the Internet domain names that could contain letters with diacritics, such as accent marks, or characters from non-Latin scripts. Currently the Top Level Domains, for example “.org" or “.fr”, can contain only Latin scripts.
A considerable work has been undertaken by ICANN to develop IDNs in particular for the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). UNESCO supports this development by ensuring that all Member States are fully aware of the issues arising from the development of IDNs and engaged in the policy debate within the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN.
08-08-2008 (Paris)
