What does diversity mean in the internet age? Linguistic and content plurality was the approach chosen by the organising committee for the Internet Governance Forum, which took place in Athens, Greece, from October 29th to November 2nd.
Diversity was one of the four issues on the table during the meetings [the other three were openness, access and security] and during the morning plenary session on November 1st, governments, civil society and the private sector (in the panel and the audience) offered different interpretations of web diversity.
Julián Casasbuenas, executive director of Colnodo, APC’s member in Colombia, participated in a panel with ten people (two women and eight men), who spoke in English, French, Spanish and Chinese about the possibilities of promoting different languages on the internet in the face of the hegemony of the English language and of Latin characters, as well as about the development of local content [1].
Julián made reference to isolated groups in Colombia and mentioned the challenge of making their cultures known via information and communication technologies. He highlighted the importance of initiatives like Creative Commons licenses, which allow the ancestral knowledge of these communities to be protected. He also emphasised the importance of free and open source software in facilitating production and publishing processes.
A large part of the panel (and the resulting discussion), however, focused on the domain name system (DNS), which currently only allows English-language characters. To what point is the domain issue representative of internet diversity? APCNews spoke with audience members, many of whom were under the impression that the discussion could have centred on some of the richer aspects (the gender issue, for example, was completely ignored).
What are the arguments that make this issue a protagonist? During this session authorities from countries that do not use the Latin-based alphabet (no more and no less than most of the inhabitants of the planet) demanded the possibility of travelling the information superhighway according to their own codes. The defenders of the current system, which include Vint Cerf (one of the “fathers” of the internet and a Google executive), claim that it is necessary to preserve the net’s stability and that domain names are “identifiers” and not “identities”.
“Every time a language dies, a vision of the world dies with it,” pronounced Adama Samassekou (president of the African Academy of Languages), giving the debate and discussion a new turn. Citing an anonymous wise man, he managed to capture the spirit that should guide the discussion: “The beauty of a rug lies in the diversity of its colours”.
For academic and activist Divina Frau-Meigs, the possibility of expressing oneself in one’s mother tongue is a basic human right of all peoples. She proposed forming an expert group to study the possibility of new tools to preserve and promote oral cultures, through, for example, recognition, indexing and the transcription of key words. A new possible route has therefore been opened for the next Internet Governance Forum (which will take place in Rio de Janeiro).
APCNews spoke with Julián Casasbuenas once the workshop had concluded. “It was good to see that other panellists also brought up the discussion of tools that allow the creation of local content. That can facilitate the inclusion of diversity,” he commented. He also highlighted the need to provide local groups with economic and technical support so that the creation and dissemination of local content can become a reality.
1 The panel was also composed of Andrzej Bartosiewicz from Poland (president of the IDN group of ITU-T research group number 17; Alex Corenthin, director of NIC Senegal and ISOC president in Senegal; Patrik Faltstrom from Stockholm, Sweden, a consultant engineer for Cisco Systems, member of the Internet Engineering Task Force and member of the Swedish government’s IT policy and strategy group; Divina Frau-Meigs, media sociology professor from the Paris 3 University, Nouvelle Sorbonne, France; professor Qiheng Hu, director of Internet Society in China; Nurul Kabir, CEO and founder of Spinnovation Limited; Keisuke Kamimura, from Glocom in Tokyo, Japan; Elizabeth Longworth, executive director of the Office of the UNESCO Director-General; Riyadh Najm from Saudi Arabia, from the Ministry of Culture and Communication of his country and president of the technical committee of the World Broadcasting Unions; and Adama Samassekou, president of the African Academy of Languages. It was presided over by Nikolay Vassilev, Minister of State Administration and Administrative Reform, and moderated by Yoshinori Imai, from NHK, the Japanese radio broadcasting corporation.