Cybersurf

Hello, Bom dia, and welcome to Cybersurf, coming to you this morning from Sao Paulo in Brazil. I am Steven Lang

This week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers or ICANN is holding it Annual General Meeting in Sao Paulo, the largest commercial hub in South America, where incidentally it has been raining almost continually for the past ten days or so.

ICANN is the body that coordinates addresses on the internet. Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN always goes to great lengths to explain that the organisation does not control or manage the Internet. He like to compare his sophisticated set up to a snail mail postal service, where ICANN coordinates the postal address system – but does not deliver the letters, does not set prices and does not say what people can put in the envelopes.

Twomey says that ICANN does not deal with e-commerce nor does it set any rules regarding hate speech or pornography – in fact it has nothing to do with content at all.

Now we know what ICANN does NOT do – so what does it do and what is the Sao Paulo meeting all about?

First of all, although the organisation is headquartered in California where it was originally incorporated, the council makes an effort to be inclusive by holding meetings in various parts of the globe. It’s also a great way to see the world.

In 2004 the final meeting of the year was held in Cape Town.

One of the most important topics of discussion here at the Sao Paulo meeting concerns Internationalised Domain Names or IDNs. When the Internet was initially set up, addresses could only use the 26 letters of our Latin alphabet; the numbers from zero to nine and a hyphen – the system is known as LDH – or Letters, Digits and Hyphen.

This is very problematic for people in countries where English is not a common language – and it can create a lot of confusion. Here in Brazil where Portuguese is the spoken language, people need to write addresses with a C cedilha – the C with a little tail - and a number of letters with accents. The LDH system ignores character sets used by billions of people in countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, Egypt and Russia.

There is also a serious risk of confusion when an individual letter is pronounced differently in diverse languages. For example the letter that looks like a P in English is in fact an R in Russian. Our letter Y has the value of a U in Russian.

You might have noticed that Russian language web sites use the country code of dot RU – which is fine if you are using the Latin alphabet and thinking in English. But if you would prefer the Cyrillic alphabet – as most Russians do – and thought in Russian – then logically all Russian addresses should end with dot PY.

The problem is that Paraguay has already secured the dot PY country code top level domain.

This is only a small example of problems created by Internationalised Domain Names. If you had add the characters of all the major languages of the world – the useable character set would have to increase from the existing 37 of the LDH system to more than fifty thousand.

So while you ponder the enormity of that problem, I’ll go back to the conference.

Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Wednesday for more Cybersurf.