1. December 2001 1 MULTILINGUAL DOMAIN NAMES JOINT ITU/WIPO Symposium - European Perspective - Richard Delmas DG Information Society Brussels EUROPEAN COMMISSION

2. December 2001 2 World Dimension of IDN Source: Global Internet Statistics

3. December 2001 3 EU Dimension of IDN - World: 3500 spoken languages. - EU: 15 nations, 11 languages and soon + 5 more languages minimum - Europe at large: 32 languages of “States” or 50 languages including demographic languages and official dialects. - Four scripts: latin, greek, cyrillic, arabic, different graphs, accents

4. December 2001 4 Nomen and DNS  Nominalism: From Guillaume d’Ockham (1285-1347) to Vint Cerf  Denomination and language: From Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) to John Postel  Universal classification: From Paul Otlet (1868-1960) to Kim Veltman  Law and Rules of Code: From Lao Tseu (600 a.c.) to Lawrence Lessig

5. December 2001 5 Institutional Framework  European Charter of Fundamental Rights (citizen rights, identity, culture)  European Charter of regional and minority languages, Council of Europe (promotion, development, culture…)  EU Treaty: articles 149, 128  EU Programmes: IST, e-content

6. December 2001 6 Why a Multilingual & Semantic Web ?  Right of access information  Diversity of culture and language  e-Europe, Trans-european Networks (interoperability)  Need for classification & content presentation, Meta Data, Memecs,...  EU Web Accessibility Initiative  E-content Projects: www.cordis.lu/econtent/

7. December 2001 7 International Organisations and Fora  ITU, WIPO, OECD, WTO, UNESCO  IETF, ICANN, GAC  MINC, CDNC, JPNIC, KRNIC,...  W3C, IEEE, ISO, Unicode Consortium, EDIRA  ICT Partnership, ECC-ISOC, CECUA, CEPIS, UNICE, etc.: Users MoU

8. December 2001 8 NEXT STEPS  Future DNS: innovation vs competition, growth & employment, common goods  Study Convergence with identification systems, R & D  Promote Users Requirements: confidence, clarity, affordability, quality of service, ergonomics  European Internet Governance: Diversity and Solidarity, International cooperation, Access to Information