Born out of a proposal made at the 2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, the (IGF) will be held from October 30 to November 2, 2006. It aims to give companies, governments and individuals space for debate about the future of the internet, but it is not a decision-making body as such. Nitin Desai, chair of the IGF's organising body, warned that a "potential culture clash" was the biggest threat to the success of the IGF. Mr Desai said:
"The forum will give voice to the citizens of the global net and help identify emerging issues which need to be tackled in the formal processes."
More than 1500 delegates will be attending the conference this week, and the four key items on the IGF's agenda are: security, diversity, openness and access.
Emily Taylor, legal director of Nominet - the UK body in charge of the .uk domain name - stressed the importance of IGF in tackling issues that were of paramount importance to internet users. She said:
"Issues around spam, cybersecurity, openness, the blocks to freedom of speech - they speak to all internet users directly." Ms Taylor also highlighted the increase of spam on the internet, as well as the rising number of phishing victims - a phenomenon highlighted by a recent Bigmouthmedia article.
So far, the most controversial debate at the IGF has surrounded the implementation of international domain names (IDN); it's a move which has been overseen by Icaan, a body appointed by the US Department of Commerce to oversee domain names like .com and .org. The aim is to allow users who do not understand or use the Latin alphabet to navigate the web in their own script, and has come under increasing scrutiny - not least from Icaan's own chief, Mr Vint Cerf. Mr Cerf, one of the founders of the net, told the IGF yesterday that, while the ability for everyone and every device to connect to the internet easily was crucial to its original foundations, making changes to the way the web works in order to accommodate a multilingual internet raised concerns about possible fragmenting.
The issue dominated the topics of debate on the first day of the IGF, and many have asserted in response to Mr Cerf's comments that the current absence of a truly multilingual internet is a major setback to its development. Vivianne Reding, the EC's Information Society Commissioner, said that the IDN was often wrongly seen as a technical issue. She claimed:
"Bridging the digital divide is not just a matter of screens and cables. It is equally important to recognise the extent and value of cultural diversity within the global village of the internet. That is why multilingualism is important."
However, Mr Cerf stressed that IDN is predominantly a technical issue, and that the introduction of other scripts into the domain name system needs rigorous testing to ensure that users will be able to reach the same online destination no matter what script they use.
"Domain names are not general natural language expressions. They are simply identifiers. They must be unique. Names registered today must be able to work into their distant future no matter what characters are added. A miss-step could easily and permanently break the internet into non-interoperable components."
This exciting first day of debates seems proof that the IGF has provided the cross-cultural discussion forum for which Mr Desai planned. This surely delivers high expectations of the IGF as a legitimate body through which web users can deliberate over the internet's future. It will not only be interesting to see what the rest of the week in Athens delivers, but which values the IGF will stand for in the future.
