| NOTAS: | This Brochure and CD-ROM package has been prepared for the joint ITU/WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names, held at the International Conference Centre of Geneva on 6-7 December 2001. It has been prepared under ITU's New Initiatives Programme.
This brochure and CD-ROM were prepared in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and have been published as part of the ITU New Initiatives series with the assistance of a voluntary contribution from the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications of Japan. Valuable inputs were provided by Lucinda Jones of WIPO and Robert Shaw of ITU.
"As background, domain names, on which Internet mail and web addresses are based, currently use a restricted subset of Latin (ASCII) characters - even for countries that do not use Latin characters in their written language. While Internet content such as web pages have been internationalized and made available in many languages, it is only recently that there have been a number of initiatives to similarly internationalize the Internet's domain name system. The implementation of multilingual domain names raises a number of complex issues. Besides technical and interoperability issues, these include, inter alia, the appropriate administrative arrangements for multilingual domains and top level domains, competition policy and market access, intellectual property and dispute resolution, as well as the related wider cultural and social issues inherently associated with languages.
The objective of the Symposium was to raise wider understanding of the issues as well as offer an opportunity for further dialogue on possible approaches to these issues. The ITU and WIPO Briefing papers, available as part of the Symposium documentation, provide a background to the respective topic areas covered. The two-day Symposium took the form of presentations and round table discussions by invited experts." |
