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Now available:
ITU
Briefing paper, WIPO
Briefing paper, Symposium presentations,
Chairman's Day One remarks, Information
Note to the Press.
Overview
The International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) and the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) hosted a Joint
Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names from 6-7 December
2001, at the International Conference Center of Geneva (CICG).
Day one of the Symposium was led
by ITU and dealt with technology and policy issues. Day two was led by WIPO and
dealt with
intellectual property and dispute resolution issues.
Objective
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.
Click here
for examples of Multilingual Domain Names.
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Updated : 25.06.2002
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