ICANN London
By Chris J Dillon, on 16 July 2014
I attended ICANN‘s 50th meeting which was held in London recently and brought together 3,400 international stakeholders from government, business, civil society, technical organizations and research institutions to discuss the development of the Internet’s addressing system. It was ICANN’S largest ever meeting by far.
Over 300 of the new generic Top Level Domains for which UCL did the linguistic checking have now been delegated.
40% of the world’s population is now connected to the Internet. In 1999, in the early days of ICANN, only 4% were connected and half of those were in North America. It is expected that 60% of the world’s population will be connected by 2020 and many, in China, India and elsewhere, do not use the Roman alphabet. Facilitating this internationalization of the Internet is the great long-term opportunity for UCL as the world’s leading centre of linguistic expertise.
One development that came to light is that Google is making good progress with internationalized email addresses. I want one! – something like 克里斯@谷歌.在线 perhaps. In Chinese, Google is written with characters meaning “valley song”.
I have a nice souvenir – I made the meeting’s deck of playing cards.