Keynote Address: APT-ITU Workshop on ENUM and IDN

Bangkok, Thailand
25-26 August 2003

Robert Shaw*
ITU Strategy and Policy Unit
International Telecommunication Union

Distinguished Delegates

It is an honour to assist in opening this APT-ITU Workshop on ENUM and IDN. I would like to relay the ITU’s special appreciation to the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity for kindly hosting and organizing this event as well as to the experts who have come here to Bangkok to share their unique knowledge, experiences and vision.

As a way of introduction, I will take this opportunity to say a few words about the organization I represent - the International Telecommunication Union. The ITU is an international organization where governments and the private sector coordination global telecom networks and services. Founded in 1865, it is the oldest specialized agency of the UN system with 189 Member States and over 700 private sector members. Its overall mandate is to maintain and extend international cooperation in telecommunications through technical and policy assistance to developing countries and to promote at the international level, the adoption of a broader approach to issues of telecommunications in the global information economy and society. Our core mission statement is “helping the world to communicate”.

The ITU’s responsibility for organizing the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) places it squarely at the center of one of the great challenges of this new millennium: building a global information society in which information and communication technologies or “ICTs” become accessible to all citizens of the world. This year, in December 2003, the first phase of WSIS will take place in Geneva, Switzerland. The anticipated outcome of this high-level Summit is the development of a shared vision by world leaders of a global information society and a plan of action, which will start to be put into place before the second phase of the Summit, which will be held in Tunisia in 2005. The next preparatory meeting where the WSIS draft declaration and action plan is to be further debated is next month in Geneva and I hope to see some of you there.

The timing of WSIS is opportune. Faced with convergence between telecommunications, broadcasting, multimedia and information and communication technologies, government policy makers and regulators are faced with new and evolving challenges at both national and international levels. A number of important ICT policy issues have already been highlighted in the WSIS process, including support for multilingualism, privacy, security, SPAM, free/open source software, management of Internet resources and interconnection. These topics suggest that the strengthening of national ICT policy making processes as well as finding new methods for international cooperation and harmonization are paramount. Of particular importance is facilitating the participation of developing countries in international ICT policy discussions so that their particular interests and concerns are understood. Unless the less powerful and the less fortunate are engaged in the discussion of global ICT coordination issues, to participate in decision-making processes, and to understand the consequences of these decisions, they will never be able to adapt their policies, regulations and practices accordingly. 

One example of the policy challenges that convergence can bring is the topic of today’s workshop: ENUM. ENUM takes numbers from the international public telecommunication numbering plan (ITU-T Recommendation E.164) and incorporates them into the Internet domain name system (DNS) for the purpose of identifying and finding network resources; this includes the possibility of assignment of E.164 resources to IP-based terminal devices. The development of a stable international framework for ENUM deployment will require the assignment of authority over elements of the E.164 number space when mapped into the DNS, as well as the assignment of ongoing management to one or more responsible authorities in each ITU Member State. The fundamental premise of the activities in the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector in this area is based on an explicit assumption that the existing role and sovereignty of Member States with respect to the allocation and management of their country code numbering resources, including the potential provisioning of those resources in the DNS, will be respected. Indeed, some national authorities are implementing what might be considered alternative approaches to ENUM. For example, the rapid growth of VOIP services over broadband in Japan and the need to interconnect with the public switched telephone network recently lead Japan policy makers to directly allocate E.164 resources to IP terminal devices, which was one of the “raison d’êtres” for ENUM. I hope to hear more about this, to my knowledge, unique national approach this afternoon from our Japanese colleagues.

As to the topic of the second day of our workshop, IDN, given that the Internet has its origins and roots in the United States, it is hardly surprising that many in the world have become accustomed to English being its lingua franca. However, one of the challenges the global Information Society brings with it is how to make the Internet more accessible to the many non-English speaking communities of the world. As the Internet becomes available to more segments of society, it is imperative that this challenge be addressed. Bridging the digital divide or preventing the emergence of a two-tiered information society by fostering equal access to information, is no longer just a question of including “minority” language speakers. For example, last December at Telecom Asia in Hong Kong, the ITU issued a report that showing that the Asia-Pacific region has become the world's most dynamic and largest telecom market — leading in advanced technologies such as broadband access and mobile data. This region now also has the largest percentage of global Internet users suggesting that the global telecommunications epicentre has now permanently shifted from North America and Western Europe to the Asia-Pacific region. If we take the global perspective, non-native English speakers are likely no longer the minority but rather the majority of Internet users.

The current Domain Name System (DNS) which forms the addressing system of the Internet is based on a subset of the ASCII character set comprised of Latin characters used in English and some other languages. Following the early pioneering work in the late 1990’s in the Asia-Pacific region at the National University of Singapore and in the Asia Pacific Networking Group, the Internet techncical community has now recognized that internationalizing the Internet addressing system is essential in order to reflect its global character, and has taken a number of initiatives to overcome the functional limitations of the current DNS.

In December 2001, the ITU jointly with World Intellectual Property Organization and the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium organized a symposium to promote greater understanding of the issues related to internationalized domain names or IDN, and foster dialogue between a wide range of participants and speakers. From the feedback we received, this was seen as a very useful event and I would particularly recommend the two background papers prepared for the Symposium on the technology, policy and intellectual property issues and available on the ITU web site at www.itu.int/mdns/.

Last year, at the ITU Plenipotentiary conference in Marrakesh, ITU’s 189 Member States passed two resolutions that are related to IDN: Resolutions 102 and 133. The latter entitled “Role of administrations of Member States in the management of internationalized (multilingual) domain names” calls for the ITU “to promote effectively the role of Member States in the internationalization of domain names and address of their respective languages.”

As this resolution originated from APT, where most work had been done on IDN, we thought that it would only be most logical to first prepare with APT this regional workshop. This is the first of a number of regional workshops that we will be organizing related to IDN with workshop in the pan-Arab region and CIS regions to follow.

There is still very much work to do for the recently IETF standardized IDN technical solutions to be widely deployed and accepted. The difficulties involved are manifold, and include not only technical issues but also extremely complex administrative and policy arrangements, intellectual property and dispute resolution as well as respecting sensitivities related to cultural and social issues. We shall explore these issues in more detail tomorrow.

I shall conclude by outlining what I believe are our objectives for this workshop. The goals are very simple. First, to bring some of the leading experts together so that they can share their experiences for the benefit of others in this and other regions. Second, give a current snapshot of some of the ongoing national activities and their implementation experiences. Third, discuss what role national administrations of ITU Member States may need to play and possible policy directions they may wish to consider. Fourth and finally, I hope that we have an opportunity to discuss further cooperative measures at both regional and international levels, particularly with regard to assisting developing countries in their consideration of these new technologies.

Thank you for your attention and my very best wishes for a successful and useful event.