EIF News

Multilingualism on the Internet is crucial to make the Internet accessible to non-English speakers. EIF's breakfast on 1 September 2010 focussed on this subject as part of the preparation for the fifth annual IGF Meeting. Speakers from the European Parliament, the European Commission and Facebook gave their opinion on the role of multilingualism on the web.

An important part of the multilingual aspect of the web has been of course the Domain Name System (DNS). The recent internationalization of domain names now allows countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia to have domain names in their native language instead of English. The technical challenge of this is that it is now possible to have 106.000 characters in domain names instead of 26. The DNS system itself has no problem handling this from a technical perspective, but it might prove problematic for the user. Security problems such as spoofing or phishing (impersonating an existing website) may be less easy to notice for example. IPR related issues such as trademarks might also prove problematic. Another issue will be the question of automatic translation tools. Would such tools (at a highly advanced level in the future) suffice or does one need an army of human translators to do the job?

These are all issues that affect EU citizens and it is crucial for Europe that we think them through and discuss them on an international platform like Vilnius. The challenges will be technical, social and political. The Parliament and the Commission are, for example, now working together with ICANN to look at Cyrillic and Greek as DNS languages, as it is important that countries can choose how they will be represented on the web.

This holds true even more so for the citizens. Facebook, available in over 70 languages today, can be said to be a prime example. The secret of the number of languages that Facebook is available in, is community translation and a modern web architecture. Community translation means that users are invited to help translate the site from English into their native language. The translations are voted on and the best translations make it into the final version. The web architecture is important because every piece of text on Facebook is held in a separate part of the database, making it easy to translate from a technical point of view.

The next IGF meeting will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 14-17 September 2010. EIF will hold a special session on 'Parliamentary Views on Europe's Digital Agenda'. This meeting, open to natianal parliamentarians and EP delegation, will take place on Thursday 16 September from 14.30 to 15.30 (room S1).

For more information about this event click here

To listen to the podcasts of the speeches click here

13 July 2010 marked the anniversary of the European Internet Foundation. The birthday was celebrated with a lively interactive event, and featured a special guest appearance by European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, the publication of an EIF survey about 'Europe's Digital Future', and a live poll from Mrs Kroes about the digital Single Market in 2015.

Pilar del Castillo MEP and EIF Chair welcomed guests and friends at the event. She called into memory that 10 years ago the world was (mostly) analogue: iPods and WIFI did not exist. Today, policy making for the Internet is in full swing and EIF plays a substantial role in European, Transatlantic and global platforms for creating Internet policy in the 21st century.

Vice Chair James Elles recalled former governors of the European Internet Foundation and the crucial role they played in its creation. Several of them were present and spoke a few words congratulating EIF with its successes. Piia-Noora Kauppi, former MEP and EIF Governor sent a special video message to congratulate EIF.

Accolades were also sent by US Congressman Bob Goodlatte and by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

Mrs Kroes then was invited to take the floor and reflected on Europe's digital future and the results of the EIF Online Survey. The survey asked respondents to rank a set of 20 questions for the Commissioner from low to high interest. 189 people responded to the call to fill out the survey.

Mrs. Kroes asked for the help of the attendees to shape Europe's Digital Future. Malcom Harbour, MEP and EIF Governor, together with Mrs Neelie Kroes conducted a live poll (part 1, part 2, part 3) using a mobile voting system in the room to test the knowledge about the European Digital Agenda. Some featured questions: is it feasible to get 50% or more of European Households subscribed to high-speed broadband by the year 2015? Is level pricing across Europe for mobile Internet access a possibility in 4 years from now?

Ajit Jaokar of FutureText then discussed the way EIF shared its survey via a policy bloggers network to receive feedback from the blogging community. He advocated that such processes are highly useful for policy formation as they involve real communities outside the political framework.

The event ended with a giant EIF cake celebrating the next 10 years of building synergies within the Internet policy community.

Click here for more info on this event.

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