Irina Bokova and Rod Beckstrom at UNESCO Paris (10 Dec 090
Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, talks to Rod Beckstrom, President and CEO of ICANN. The video was made in Paris on 10 December 2009, when a significant step was taken towards greater linguistic diversity on the Internet when UNESCO signed an agreement with ICANN - the body that assigns online addresses to Internet users - to help put into operation the first multilingual domain names.
The cooperation agreement follows the recent decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to introduce IDNs, or Internationalized Domain Names, in non-Latin script. Until now, domain names in Internet addresses (for example .org, .com) were written using characters from the Latin alphabet exclusively. On November 16, in the first phase of the plan, ICANN began accepting requests from representatives of countries and territories around the world for new country codes in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. Non-Latin script users will eventually have access to internet addresses completely in their own language. More info: http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=29372&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html