In five years time the Internet is likely to be very different from what it is now. This is no reference to the stark changes we’ve seen on the Internet in the last five years. Broadband, open standards, Web 2.0 and Google are all pale in comparison to what could happen. And I’m not talking about Web 3.0.
The Internet of five years time could no longer be an International Network. At the moment the greater amount of content on the Web is in English and the main driving force behind the content is the United States. That is rapidly changing. Soon China will be leading the way on the Internet, but the Internet does not support what China needs.
The BBC have covered a conference in London discussing the future of the Internet at which Nitin Desai of the United Nations discussed the limits of today’s Internet and how things will need to change very quickly in order to prevent the Internet from splitting up. Literally Chinese Walls could appear because of the Internet and Web’s roots in Western culture and the Latin alphabet. Domains names still use the latin character set, something that is simply alien to the Chinese. The article also says that in China the Web is used for public services rather than for commerce and media which is the prevalent usage in western cultures.
Nitin Desai chairs the Internet Governance Forum who will meet to discuss what must be done to avoid fragmentation of the Internet and what he refers to as Balkanisation. Fundamentally a Chinese Web would be separate from what we know as the Web today.
The languages of the United Nations are English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian. Of those languages Chinese, Arabic and Russian do not have the same represenatation currently on the Web, there are no proper domain name services or control for Russian, Arabic or Chinese.
China has vented its frustration against ICANN, who manage root level domains on the Internet, several times calling the United States control of the Internet a ‘monopolisation‘. As a result of ICANN not acting quickly enough and governance of the Internet passing to the United Nations China set up its own domain naming convention earlier this year. Still this domain is ‘CN’ which is not actually using the Chinese sinographs.
In 1998 I spent 7 weeks working in Rome for the United Nations during which time the Secretary General was present for the estalishment of the International Criminal Court. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was the principal piece of legislation that formed the Court. So why do I mention this? Well my job was primarily working on the IT helpdesk supporting a variety of activities during the conference. One thing I did do was to collect documents that had been typed up during the plenary sessions and FTP the documents from Rome to New York to have them translated. The documents would then be FTP’d back and I’d print them off to go to reprographics for the next set of plenary sessions the follwoing day. In actual fact I printed off the first copy of the Rome statute and took it to be bound so that it could be signed on 17th July 1998. What did strike me though in doing all of this were the languages. Not just the language on the printed documents but also that I had to learn how to use Windows 3.11 in Chinese. Fortunately for me the menu items were in the same place as the English version. But it was clear to me at that point that English is not the language of the World.
The Internet Governance Forum meets in Athens 30th October until 2nd November. Kofi Annan, the Secretary General (whom I met back in July 1998) says in his message on the IGF website
“In its short life, the Internet has become an agent of dramatic, even revolutionary change and maybe one of today’s greatest instruments of progress. It is a marvelous tool to promote and defend freedom and to give access to information and knowledge. WSIS saw the beginning of a dialogue between two different cultures: the non-governmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision-making; and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental organizations. It is my hope that the IGF will deepen this dialogue and contribute to a better understanding of how we can make full use of the potential the Internet has to offer for all people in the world.”
Let’s hope they pull it off.