Workshop 8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right

WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism : Internet next frontier (1) Fully inhabit the Web without limitations or obstacles : Internet as a common good. Multilingualism is constitutive of mankind : 3000 to 7000 living/modern languages 1% of languages spoken by 94% of mankind 99% of languages spoken by 6% of mankind expansion of dominant languages while death of others around 65 different alphabets (so, not only Latin!) Minorities and less spoken languages are absent from the Web. Fight for multilingualism should help bridge the digital divide.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism : Internet next frontier (2) RankLanguage Comrie (1998) Weber (1997) SIL Ethnologue 1.Mandarin Chinese Hindi + Urdu Spanish English Arabic Bengali Russian Portuguese Japanese German

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism : Internet next frontier (3) Corpus of existing laws and conventions to protect multilingualism : UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992). Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe). UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) common humanity heritage.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism : Internet next frontier (4) World Summit Information Society - TUNIS - November 2005 COMMITMENT : Article 14, recognize[s] that in addition to building ICT infrastructure, there should be adequate emphasis on developing human capacity and creating ICT applications and digital content in local language, where appropriate, so as to ensure a comprehensive approach to building a global Information Society. Article 32, states committed to promote the inclusion of all peoples in the Information Society through the development and use of local and/or indigenous languages in ICTs and [to] continue [their] efforts to protect and promote cultural diversity, as well as cultural identities, within the Information Society.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism : Internet next frontier (5) In reality, today, the progress of diversity and of multilingualism on line is slow. Why?

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Obstacles to Multilingualism on line (1) Technology is not neutral, predominance of Latin script. Difficulty to use IT due to lack of knowledge of code languages. Difficulty to adapt technology to local context. Standards : Unicode vs ISO, link between coding and script, etc. Limitations of domain names label restricted to 63 characters (RFC 1034). Punycode (*) has many restrictions and complex coding (RFC 3492 contains 35 pages, including 10+ pages of C code). (*) Punycode transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string. The ASCII characters in the Unicode string are represented « as is », and the non-ASCII characters are represented by a combination of allowed ASCII characters : letters, numbers, and hyphen/dash. By example, « bücher » becomes « bcher-kva » with Punycode. Hence, the domain name « bücher.ch » is represented by « xn--bcher-kva.ch » in IDNA.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Obstacles to Multilingualism on line (2) Platforms for mobile applications are also extremely limited. Some standards like keyboard layouts still hamper multilingualism. Few software tools are truly multilingual. Economic incentive is lacking for software developers to produce tools in many languages. Counterexample : the open source community.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Obstacles to Multilingualism on line (3) SO WHAT ?

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism, cyberspace : what to do next ? (1) What are the next steps to progress toward a multilingual cyberspace? The issue should probably be tackled with an interdisciplinary approach : ICT linguistics tools production and distribution of content economy law etc. Some recommendations ?

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism, cyberspace : what to do next ? (2) 1. Improve multilingualism in new technological applications, such as mobile platforms, web crawlers, search engines, etc. 2. Use of a universal common standard agreed by international communities (ISO 8859, etc.) 3. Develop the creation and use of online content in minority languages. 4. New rights relevant to multilingualism in cyberspace should be identified, granted and protected.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? Multilingualism, cyberspace : what to do next ? (3) 5. Use of alternative arbitration and mediation mechanisms to promote linguistic diversity (for example in the system of Domain Name Dispute Resolution of WIPO*). 6. Promote the question of linguistic diversity on the web as a major issue on the international agenda. 7. Towards a true international framework of law and rules for the governance of the Internet : a treaty? * WIPO = World Intellectual Property Organization.

Multilingualism on the Internet as a human right WS8 : What role can human rights play in Internet policy? ITS UP TO YOU, NOW !