On the second day of the 12th Internet Governance Forum, which is currently being held in Geneva, together with the non-profit organization SEEDIG and national domain registries of Macedonia and Nepal, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ held the collaborative session, Multilingual Internet: IDNs under the Magnifying Glass. The session was moderated by Mikhail Anisimov, Deputy Head of the Information Department at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and Andrea Becalli, Stakeholder Engagement Director for Europe at ICANN.
Irina Danelia, deputy director at the Coordination Center, talked about the experience of developing one of the oldest IDN domains in the world, the .РФ domain, and the prospects of further development of IDN domains. “Businesses do not always get the full picture of what the company could gain from working with IDN domains,” she said. “Being able to use their native language on the internet is highly important for many people. That is why introducing IDNs should become a part of companies’ corporate social responsibility programs, just like caring for the environment is today.”
Edmon Chung, head of the DotAsia registry, talked about the issues hindering the development of IDNs. “One of IDNs major issues is their inability to work with e-mails to their fullest,” he said. “The second issue is the correspondent identification: when someone in Europe receives a letter from China, which is written in hieroglyphs, he or she cannot know for sure who it came from.”
The participants of the session suggested introducing World IDN Day, modeled after the existing World IPv6 Day. On this day experts could discuss IDN issues, share experience and find ways to address these issues.
At the end of the session, experts shared the best examples of non-Latin domain names, listing a number of domain names in Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Macedonian and Chinese languages.
On the same day, ICANN held its open session, where experts discussed the most relevant issues that the participants of the world domain market are currently facing. Due to the tightening of national and regional legislation in this sphere, namely, implementation of the GDPR, the issue of storing and processing personal data became the major issue. In his presentation, Goran Marby, President and CEO of ICANN, noted that all existing laws are binding. “Law is law, and I would like to refrain from making personal assessments. I would also like to say, however, that very often the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
