WS 92 THE SOCIAL ROLE OF A ccTLD | Internet Governance Forum

FINISHED TRANSCRIPT

EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES ‑ ENHANCING MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 23, 2013
9:00 AM
WORKSHOP 92
THE SOCIAL ROLE OF A ccTLD

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> ANNE RACHEL INNE: Good morning, everybody. My name is Anne‑Rachel Inne. My background is also not in ccTLD, which is one of the reasons why some of the the organizations asked me to moderate this workshop, Workshop 92, which is about the social role of ccTLD. This morning we have a series of panelists. We're also going to have a presentation from CENTR about the survey that two of the organizations did and sort of tell us a bit about the results. Then we'll hear about and then we'll hear about the how they're faring in their role as a social instrument also from .NG, CO of Internet registration agency.

Then we'll hear about also from .MX, we're going to talk a little bit more about the Internet and what they're doing in country. And we're going to hear about the certain platform for national Internet access. Then you'll hear about little bit about industry in what they're doing in ccTLD. And we have Sarah Falvey here from Google. We'll have a question and answer period. I'm happy to just without further ado start the meeting, get this presentation on the circuit.

Peter?

>> PETER VAN ROSTE: Good morning, everyone. My name is Peter Van Roste. I'm here with Latvia LD. We started the survey and our goal was to have just a sound basis of the essential statistics in the market ccTLD in terms of the market and the social responsibilities, and who is using the ccTLD and why they are using.

I want to point out that, for us, this is just a starter for any follow‑up if possible. We had the participation for ccTLD especially from the African and Asian region. We would welcome participation. So this is the first one is a view of how it looks like. Also, the ccTLD and obviously it is somewhat tangential. This is a status of the first.

Market share is between zero to 5%, and 17 between 60 and 75, 75 and a hundred. So it total, 61% of the ccTLDs have a market share that was larger than 50%. These stats are, of course, based on the information that is available on the national statistic for ccTLDs which are sometimes hard to find. Next slide, please.

So I used the local ccTLD for participants. It was very simple. They found in the local market. The registrants use it. I think it's a surprise because I thought the second one would have been rated higher, but only nine participants indicated that trust of security was the main reason why the ccTLD was used and then a combination of all the above.

Next slide, please.

The question we ask when you gave them a list of 12 providers of services in the structure in the government, and we also was using and the results are quite convincing for almost eight of those very strange exceptions. Lower than the others, in particular, if you realize the reason for having ccTLD. They are being used by universities.

You see those organizations generate which will help significantly and the ccTLD also help with the market.

Next slide, please.

This is the last one. When we asked the ccTLDs how they worked together and what type of abilities they were involved that support that local energy, and so almost all of them are involved in initiatives that develop the Internet in their region. 12 out of the 56 ccTLDs that supported this created local content, in particular then the contact center we speak of today, 20 of those support local government initiatives, most of which feed into regional. So that's it. I hope that provides the basic summary and idea of how our basis is used. Thank you.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: So this is a survey that was done from the European and Latin American ccTLDs. Coming from the African region, and knowing the place very well, I can say that if all ccTLDs country codes are to grow, I guess we'll see somewhat of the same apparent. We are not there yet. We've got quite a few challenges with a couple of the domains in the continent. Mary will tell you a bit more.

Mary?

>> MARY UDUMA: Actually, why not? Okay.

>> Thank you very much, Peter. Just so I get a better sense as to the results and how to think about them, these were results that were answered by the ccTLDs. You were asking the ccTLDs why their registrants were using that. So how did they know most of them had done their research? That research might not necessarily be the last couple of months, but most of them had worked with their registrars and got an idea.

>> PETER VAN ROSTE: Thank you very much. That would also be true for who is using the local ccTLDs. Based on my experience in the Pacific, you have different domains used for the Website of the organization and the actual e‑mail that the staff used. So in some places they may very well have, for example, .WS website for the government department, but all the staff used Gmail.

>> I don't think we have stats to that level. Those were basically pretty easy to figure that out.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Yeah, we can talk all about later. I see a lot of them in the African group.

Mary?

>> MARY UDUMA: Thank you. My name is Mary Uduma. My organization is NiRA. We are not using .NG, but I'll tell you we have to carry out that's a switch to .NG. But the government took it off from there. As of today there is no government initial carry any card without it. So is working for us. Just to show the work we have done in Nigeria, I am the president of the organization and not the profit making organization. For that, we would talk about .NG and really blessed with the chance to grow and sustain ideas, because they call the Internet to making business and making money. We are also happy in trying to convince our business online. I tell you more about that. The local need is relevance. One is, are the people relevant online and to take pride in using the .NG? What is relevant? And one of the things that finds me wanting, what is it? We have action because in the situation the .NG is made of the government represented by National Information Government Agency. We have based on the media and also from the academia.

Then there is the local content issue, business for developing local content and that we create job. So in the development of the Internet community and infrastructure, we have projects such as local Internet content, businesses online. Working with Google -- Google has been helping so much in driving that.

We give free domain names. Nigeria is trying to create jobs and giving to business IPS. The president of Nigeria promised we would have domain names and they would have websites. So we participated by giving out 5,000 domain names free.

During independence we also gave out 50,000 free domain names. And I told them switch to .NG. And also we have the secretary for Nigeria and I just ‑‑ we also have checkpoints; however, we are also creating access to infrastructure. So in that way we are trying to create a form or a platform where people in the domain name. We have the E‑inclusion. The picture because we have he the NG, IGF, so this is a part of the.

We have communication technologies to the e‑governance. Now like a law, like the head of the federal government of Nigeria sent out to all civil servants in Nigeria that we must carry .govern.NG. All is on communication technology, people from various and various positions. We are establishing a foundation where we are going to call the youth to take over a business in the Internet space.

At the last IGF we did, and then it was rewarding, registrars are all over the world; also, child online protection. We also participate so there is a benefit in each country that is present is increased organic traffic composition on value, and there is business value as well. We allow for in language and allow for such results. And we build local content. Thank you.

(Applause)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you. We'll go straight to Hongbin Zhu. He is going to tell us.

>> HONGBIN ZHU: My name is Hongbin Zhu. I come from China. A general question, why is this so special? Actually, when we think about ccTLD, many of us think that ccTLD ‑‑ most of us, actually, so we have some of us had larger basis and we can actually to a certain extent to the usage. But actually, I don't think so. Our users use ccTLDs not only because they're larger, but a larger single basis.

At the very beginning we decided from 1997 we used to have only 4,000 names. At that time there are a lot of .com. It's quite a lot. As you can see we managed to survive. We have a localized center and we also have more accountability concerning how we deal with how we perform social growth in the industry.

The other point I want to make is that ccTLD is also a best role to perform as explorer of the sample. You can see we have developed a comprehensive solution within the local users. Actually, we have various standards which the local users. That needs more details. As you can see, in China we have two writing systems, which is simplified Chinese. Chinese users see this kind of true writing system almost the same. That's minor differences when you're writing it. Sometimes people can be confused about it. Actually, we have developed a comprehensive solution to deal with this problem and we can ‑‑ we now have proof that the international centers to mitigate potential issues or abuse. Actually, I think it's one of our best practice for the local communities. We reach this kind of practice could be absorbed by the ccTLD community. It is our expectation.

Also, there is the organization called Alliance of China. This alliance actually can solicit the official website and they can provide shut‑down service for people who actually have a business. If they have that kind of problem, they can report to a solution.

Next slide, please.

And one central point I wanted to make is that ccTLD is so special because we are actually in the center of the Internet ecosystem. We have ‑‑ we have leveraged the relationship between different kind of stakeholders. Our target is the interests, especially in Asian countries, people from Indonesia. If we remain the same, we can't go into the future. We need to make change. Right now we see it is coming, but also gives us many opportunities which actually transform our organization, mainly to research and international relationship, more active relation.

Actually, we could help ccTLDs to operate and we can help the ccTLDs to go into the international community more so the international governance and we can use our expertise guarantee they have ‑‑ they may do things according to the user expectation and local needs. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you, Hongbin. I think I'd like to just for everybody put some keywords out Hongbin was saying some policy rolls for ccTLDs and able to think about that so we can have a little bit of a provision for that. I think it's really important to know. But everybody is talking about the Internet Governance and policy proposals that can go to not only governments, but show the ccTLD being the center of stakeholders practically at home. I think that's an center one. Thank you very much.

Andrei?

>> ANDREI KOLESNIKOV: Thank you very much. My name is Andrei Kolesnikov. I'm working for ccTLD Russian Federation. They focus on public goods, meaning a special noncompetitive group. Residents can be excluded from the use of ‑‑ our domains must be available for everybody who is interested in the domain name.

We are among country code and let me share some. Next slide, please.

Okay. So who do we address to our local community and to our local market? First of all, of course we do the joke of international country code, but we also have a very unique situation with IDNs. We have IDN and ccTLD, which is about 820,000 domain names. Still a number of IDN. Of course, we care a lot about universal acceptance of the IDN's. We should say that there is no equal treatment and equal acceptance of the IDN's, unfortunately. And we experience it, for example, in the absence of support of the IDN. But we do some work in this area.

Also, we have a unique project in weeding out malware and taking care of those sites. We have a large database collecting information from the different sources. So it starts 1.2 million addresses including domain names at the second to the third level. So very interesting project. Just of course, we do a lost variation of legislation on the technical matters, because the recent days there is a big activity in Russian legislation field in terms of Internet regulations. Let me say some of them need a stronger technical background to make the technically implemented better than it is now. For example, we have very interesting project the Internet game called governance of the Internet. It's in the the schools and this is where people get their education about Internet, what it is, how it works. It's an online game and participate on that and it's very interesting.

We do localized. This is our traditional spring event. It's like five times already. Some of you as I see you have participated there.

Also, we help one of our companies is doing a nonprofit projects to build safer place for the children. A very interesting area where we are involved is an agenda for the judges and for the people participating in the different courts to make ‑‑ to judge appropriately, not just violations of technical standards. Also, just last year was a localized subbranch in Russia formed. We also do some work in this area.

So basically what we do, our main focus right now, is to promote literacy, because this is a very interesting project. We have to move into really deeper, want the support of the e‑mail. Also, with the communications, which is the largest of the commercial companies, we also do really conserve the Russian Internet economy.

Sponsorship, we do a lot of investment in public events, forums, educational entities. We have pretty standard country code. Back in many other countries, we do the same things.

Thank you.

(Applause)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you. We'll go directly to Martin.

>> MARTIN PETERKA: Hello. My name is Martin Peterka. I work for the domain name registry. This side you can see some basic information about our organization. So it is a nonprofit organization and from our point of view it means that all the profit which you add from government business to the community. We do it for a variety. We have projects from furlough or education and security code to corporation and marketing campaigns. Here is a short list of them. As maybe a bit unusual example, I tried to how to use the Internet, which is for the general public.

In fact, there is a series of these spots and the result has about two minutes. We tried to decide in a fun forum. As a guide for this series, we try in different topics and note the experience, beginners of the Internet.

Last year during summer we use one of the free televisions to the general public, which has a large share. We were quite successful. If you imagine the population of Czech Republic, at the end of the public survey and 55 percent of respondents of this survey knew the series and most of them were fine with it. So we decided to go through with the project during this summer. We had the five results. I'll try to show a short video. It's some highlights from our first season. So it's in Czech, so I hope you enjoy it. Give me a second.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: While Martin is doing that, I'll just talk about one of the things that I've seen that is also somewhat of a part of all the ccTLDs. Most of the time it looks like I would like to do the discussions and have a few people tell us if there's anybody here who operates a T that is a for profit and how it is for an example. I would love to also hear their interesting technical domains.

(Video)

(Not translated into English)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much, Martin. That was very enter tank. We'll go directly to .MX and finish off the presentations because we don't have too much time left. We'll go into the questions and answers period.

We're good online? Yeah. Okay.

>> EDUARDO SANTOYO: Thank you. Let me give the view. My organizations see social needs, for becoming involved and looking for solutions in the social needs. The thing is, what could be the role of the organization in the local community and what could be the role of ccTLD within the local community. And the third question is it could be any difference. I will try to give you an answer for all these questions in my next slides, but the short answer is ccTLDs are different. They are additional triggers pause we are part of a special ecosystem, not only the regular organizations triggers to attend to social needs.

The initial responses that regular organizations have for those social needs are mainly philanthropy, welfare support, though schools in our communities and all these kind of things. Those things are really good. It makes up better work and it should continue. But it has a small "but." It doesn't solve any problem. It's very limited when it comes to solving all those problems. Still, it could be done, but by someone else.

All kind of responses from regular organizations or even ccTLDs incorporate social responsibility, which is wider answer or wider response of philanthropy, but also at the national community.

This is still good. It still makes a better place, but it makes the world a better place. It should continue. But there might be something else that we as ccTLDs can do. Still the corporate responsibility could be done by someone else. What's the thought on this by .MX? This is what we have done in the last years. We want first to make sure that we address our most relevant goals. And we think that the main social responsibility of any single organizations are their mission, their vision, as long as they try to attend all the mission goals, they will be attending their most relevant social responsibility. If we don't do it, no one else will. Well, someone else will, but after we fail. We don't want to fail. That's the point. So for us, that's our main social responsibility to attend our goals.

Furthermore, we want to make it with the highest technical service and employee satisfaction standards. We have to make it efficient, even though we are not for profit. We need to be efficient. We have to be sustainable. Once again, if we don't do it, no one else will.

In the same or ‑‑ at the same time we want to spread Internet principles on Internet governance principles. Those are two different things. We think we do have a role. We are part of an ecosystem, first in a local ecosystem and a very specific level with our employees, then their families, then our community, then the country and, of course, we are part of a global ecosystem called the Internet, and the Internet authorities and all these things.

We make contributions to organizations with a specific role to protect those principles, like the Internet Society, not only the global Internet Society, but also the local chapter. We held deploy a graphical survey, which contains standard measurements of demographics on Internet together with some countries.

We have held since, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago, to develop ‑‑ to create regional organizations like Latin LD in 1999. We are founders, like LATNIC in 2002, but very involved in the early stages of LATNIC, LACNOC and other regional projects. Also, we are funding local initiatives or the local initiative to discuss Internet governance topics. Attending and addressing all the Internet governance principles like dialogue, like a place to have a dialogue rather than conclusions in a multi‑stakeholder environment with no single strong company sponsoring that event. We want to make sure that it's happening in Mexico.

Do what no one else can do or at least what no one else can do it better. Thank you.

(Applause)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Now to our industry colleague, Sarah.

>> SARAH FALVEY: I'll be quick. I'll be more of a wrap up and hopefully we can get to questions. My name is Sarah Falvey. I work at Google. You know, one of the reasons why I thought this panel was really interesting is talking about cc's, I think it's really sort of the first way that people think about identity online. It's the first way that everyone from the beginning of the Internet sort of began thinking about identity online because when you see the cc, you automatically assume that the company or the person is from a certain region. That brings with it a certain set of values and things like that.

At Google we were obviously a global company, but we have Google dot whatever registered in all the cc's globally. We do that because it's a way for us to sort of serve local content to our users in the region where they are. And it's important for us, because it's a way for us to touch our users wherever they are and sort of whatever they're specifically looking for.

And I think we're not the only company that does that. It's a huge project for us. Going back to sort of ‑‑ but one of the things we do try to do is create this unified experience so that no matter where you are, if you type Google. wherever you are, it's the same as if you typed Google.com or Google.uk. One of the things we're figuring in the community is create a unified experience across all cc's. All the people up here have totally different perspectives in terms of what they're doing in their region and sort of what they're focusing on. Andrei talked a lot about sort of security and not all cc's are able to have a real high level of security.

So what happens is that users will go to a cc. The first ‑‑ and it won't sort of ‑‑ the resiliency or sort of the resolve ability won't be the same across all cc's and felt that sort of creates a situation where users feel like there must be something wrong with the cc or there must be something going on. And so what we really try to do is work within the community, particularly at the ccNSO to share information so that all cc's and sort of users of those cc's are working together so that the cc remains resilient so that we're sharing information so that Mary, who is in Nigeria, who is a volunteer, is able to have the same access to resources as anybody else up here. That's really important because from a community perspective cc's sort of need to work together. In a lot of sense they are the first way that people think about access egg the Internet particularly in the region and it's something that's very local.

So making sure that the entire space is resilient and working together, I think, is really important. That's something that we've been changing our focus on a lot and using ICAN and other groups to share information and work together to share resources as well. And I know we're not the only company that does that.

So that's sort of really kind of what I wanted to focus on. I think there was a little bit of discussion around ‑‑ this may be a question around gTLD and what are the rolls of gTLDs going to be on cc's. We were having this discussion yesterday, and I think cc's are just really great and they're really dynamic and you can do things with them that you can't do with gTLDs. There was a discussion earlier about many of the cc's are nonprofits. They're serving their communities. They're working with their governments. They're serving their local population. That's something that you're seeing a little bit of change. But in general, that's not ‑‑ that will not change. And I think that's a really important thing to remember, particularly as we see a new generic top level domains and it becomes more confusing to navigate the Internet.

I think the cc's will be there as a sign post and the navigation tool for people who really want to find local content.

(Applause)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thanks very much there. So we're going to start with questions. Emily ‑‑ Leslie, we'll wait and see if we have anybody online from the remote moderator. One person. Do they have a question? Oh, okay. They don't have a question yet. I guess we can just go through the room. Leslie?

>> LESLIE CROWLEY: Hi. Leslie Crowley, CEO/chair of the CCSO until quite recently. I'd like to pick up on Sarah's comments. I was really pleased to hear you say that cc's are so great and dynamic, because we always have been. So it's nice to have acknowledgment that that's the case.

But more significantly, as chair of the ccNSO, you mentioned Google's participation in the ccNSO. I have to say I haven't noticed any. But you would be very welcome. You would be very welcome. I know that a number of us engage with Google on a national level, but in the ccNSO, I may have been out of the room, but I think I've missed you.

>> SARAH FALVEY: This is something that started at the Costa Rica meeting. So what we've been doing -- and I talked to my engineers before I left, because I thought this question would come up. And I was right. What we've been doing, particularly Warren Cumar and a software engineer that goes by the moniker MMB, he came to the Beijing meeting and I thought we sent someone to one other meeting that's escaping me. We would say, oh, Fiji, your cc went down and let's see what we can to through the community and do it on more of a one off basis. That's typically how we approach the problem, which is fantastic, but then you can't share information around. So what was going on in Fiji and as other things that we can learn from that experience that other people can learn from. And so the Costa Rica meeting was where we started giving presentations on more kind of from the attack side what we're seeing instead of doing it more on a one off basis. That's a program that we're sort of trying to build out. Obviously, there is more that we can to. And I think that's what we're trying to do. I think we're sending someone to the BA meeting as well.

>> LESLEY COWLEY: I think we've been on our first date. We would welcome a more established relationship. And certainly I know Warren personally as well, and he's great, and he's great and dynamic, too. I just would suggest that it would be mutually beneficial to take that to a different level and to not be too concerned about talking about individual targets or whatever. We're quite used to having ways of dealing with that at ccNSO without naming individuals. We can learn from each other's experience he is.

>> SARAH FALVEY: Fiji was just an example.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you, Leslie. And I think from my own experience, Google is not the only organization that is ‑‑ that goes around asking ccTLDs to work individually with them.

We have a question there in the back? Could you introduce yourself?

>> My name is Andy from Bandi is a .ID from Indonesia. My first question is to Mary Uduma. Last year we had similar program with you. We are cooperating with Google to provide the 10,000 for one year ‑‑ 100,000. But the users who renewed the domain name is only about 10%. Also, the program not reach 100,000, but only about 20,000. The SM area, then the next year renew is only 10%. So what about your experience in Nigeria?

The second question that to Hongbin from China. I'm attending your program in August. It is a good experience for us to learn from China who I think is already success ccTLDs and also to get engaged the ccTLDs. And I believe I know you are also the IDN, China, and I think this is a direct question. How many percent of Internet users in China can read China compared to live character? You get the question? Okay? Thank you.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you. Mary, go ahead.

>> MARY UDUMA: When we clocked 50 in Nigeria as an independent country, we offered 50 domain names for free. And the bad news was that only 10 percent was taken out of the 50. It could be communication issues or the Internet access also, because it's a bit high. And so it was only 10 percent that was taken. During the renewal we had another 50% renewal out of the 10 percent that was taking off.

One of the Google online in Nigeria business is online. Because it was free, a lot of people rushed for it. And when it was time for renewal and because the renewal was still done by Google he will with renewals. I think the next time that we are going to do the renewal by themselves. It would be the same thing as we experienced. That's what we have experienced that renewal. But those that want to register domains in the .NG domain name, we've had about 80% renewal experience. So that is when it is free, yeah, people rush, take it, but when it comes to renewal.

As for the one we have given to Nigeria government project, we believe that the government would also do the renewal so we may see the renewal on that 100%. We don't have too many domain names registered. Less than 50,000 domain names because the dot coms, dot nets, they were all there before we started. So we're doing a catch‑up thing. I think I want to greet the courage of our colleague from Czech. That video, I think we are going to the same thing so that we tell people and to encourage them to take up the ccTLDs and .NG.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Before Sarah or Hongbin speak, I would like to say.

There is a question of when they compare them to the example of generic TLDs, they find is it a question of easy access to new gTLDs? Is it pricing? Anybody have thoughts about this? Do you guys have ‑‑ Hongbin?

>> EDUARDO SANTOYO: Most of the time the red light penetration refers to the level of the country of different areas like the IT and communications. Mexico is like 60 or 70 place in the level of IT deployment. And the low level of penetration of domain names answer to all those things then you have the advantages that you offer a ccTLD with strong links to your local community, applying your own laws of privacy, consumer protection, and all those things that are unlikely to be offered by the gTLD. It's a verdict form complicated situation. The economy of the scales are very different. We are 200 times smaller than the biggest gTLD and we cannot offer the same price at a gTLD. That's a big issue.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thanks. Hongbin, did you want to answer wet?

>> HONGBIN ZHU: Thank you for the question. I'm glad you mention about that issue. In China so far as I know, about 80% people who cannot read the English words actually, of course, even they have some kind of basic education about the English, but as far as I know that there are only 20% who can actually speak or read the English fluently. So the problem is very serious.

So if you can imagine that.

>> Let me be more brutal. I would say that if Google has full access to the Chinese market, we would not have a problem with ID e‑mail. I'm talking about Google. But this is very true. And it's very unfortunate that all our letters to the heads of Google begging for the IDN full support e‑mail end up with nothing. It's very unfortunate.

>> SARAH FALVEY: One of the great benefits of the new gTLD program is it launched IDN's, I think, much more ‑‑ I don't want to say fully, but there's a lot more of them. And I think it brought it front and center for a lot of people, companies like Amazon and Verisign and companies like that applied for IDN. We can't apply for an IDN and not have it function in our products. This is a huge ‑‑ I'm doing outreach this week on the justice issue. And believe me it's gotten a lot of attention internally. I think we're planning on having it fully compatible by the end of the year. I totally agree with you. Especially if it doesn't work in products, then IDN's won't be developed. And so it's not just our products. I think it's a lot of companies didn't realize what they were or why they should care about them.

>> Microsoft supports it.

(Laughter)

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: The industry is actually being reactive, which is great. The region where I'm coming from has a lot of the most ‑‑ the really big number of languages. Even though quite a few can be reached with the standardized, the issue is we have quite a few that are right now not even ‑‑ not finished yet in the coding phase. We absolutely need that to happen because we also have a region where we are about 60% on the, let's say, literate in the Spanish and the other languages. We have a question here and then there.

>> I'm from Indonesia. Why is it so hard to compete with the gTLD. I think we have to recognize that domain name cannot stand alone. So why when you give the free domain to small business and they don't get return to the domain names, because first we have to see what kind of business they are onto. And if it's not really most wanted business, it's really hard for them to compete with another business that use gTLD.

Then the other thing is about the advertisement system. In my imagination, the small business cannot afford to pay for advertisement to the Internet. So although they use ccTLD, but they're not really familiar or not known their customers.

And then in this case I hope that Google to have the ccTLD registry, to push the advertisement to the Internet.

Then also for the strategy for ccTLD registry is now to have the small business to have the interactive content like .CH. Yeah, so the communication or interaction between the company, the business owner with the customers, because the domain name cannot stand alone. It's nothing ‑‑ I am as a customer will look for the value of the business rather than to the domain name. Is maybe domain name is the last thing that I saw. If the company advertisement, I would look, what they use? Oh, ID.com? But when the value ‑‑ when the content of the business is not really enter active with the customer, so although you give the free domain name, the effect is, I'm sure, is just a little impact to the domain name business itself.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you. Can you take it to the back there? Thank you.

>> Hello. My name is Australian IGF ambassador. And I want to talk about another diversity issue that may not have been raised. I came in a little bit late. That is accessibility for people with disability. We heard in the opening ceremony from CHARDI of WC 3 in regard to the Web accessibility guidelines and the impact that has on the disability community. Last year at last week's Australian IGF, we learned the Australian government has a strategy to make sure all government websites are accessible. That type of focus could be reflected in ccTLDs as strategy or best practice.

Doing that, not only is good social responsibility, but aims to meet the market. We're talking about one billion people with disability globally, and at least 15% of any country's population. So there is some market there if more and more websites are made accessible.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much for raising that, ambassador. Is that something that you guys do? CcTLD operators? Do you think about people with disabilities?

>> MARY UDUMA: One of the things we do is with the development of that development.

>> It just hit me that we actually found yet another function or perspective with regard to the Russias and China's ccTLDs operation. That's the expansion of their best practices throughout the respective regions, which is for Russia the CIS, the commonwealth of independence states, and for China let's put it Confucius region. As far as the ccTLD operates, I believe that we are growing to some kind of nucleus. For those regions with the best practices and pools of expertise and knowledge for their respective nations, which an exercise which does not necessarily need to engage any Internet giant or just at least we can compete in that respect with them.

Thank you.

>> ANDREI KOLESNIKOV: I heard there is a technology being developed in Australia about the disabled people with, like, special devices for, like, blind people. But this is very at the top of the technology. It's not necessarily very well‑known in other countries. As far as I know, there is no special programs for disabled people in Russia. It's very unfortunate, but I think it's a matter of a few years it will become more visible and more available.

>> I think AVDA, open source software, it's open source for software for blind people so anything on the screen is then relayed by speech output. It very much depends on how websites are designed if the screen reading software can actually convert that to speech. That's why the signing according to international guidelines is so important.

In regard to Russia, I can't say off the top of my head what is happening, but they are worldwide disability organizations and technology programs in a number of countries. And I'll be happy to talk with you afterwards about that.

>> CHUCK GOMES: Chuck Gomes from Verisign. What we have found over the years is that when new gTLD or existing TLDs as they expand, that the whole market benefits from that. You may not have a lot of marketing dollars to market your ccTLD, there's benefit from what others are doing, whether it be gTLD or etc. In other words, the whole market expands when other gTLDs or other ccTLDs are competing with you. It's not a matter of you doing it all yourself. Obviously marketing does come into play and it's helpful.

With regard to competition of ccTLDs versus a .com, a lot of us think it's either/or. What we found is in a lot of cases they coexist very well. They may register ccTLD or international register will register multiple gTLDs. So the last thing I want to say is with regard to ccTLDs competing with gTLDs, we have a great amount of history on that over the last 10 to 15 years. And if you're new to that, look at what some of the ccTLDs have done. In certain countries, the ccTLDs do extremely well with .com, for example. Look at the things that they have done. You don't have to look very far. You don't have to just look at developed countries, either. In developing countries some of them are doing very well. So I guess what I'm doing here is suggesting that you look at the historical trends that have happened over the last 15 years with regard to ccTLD growth. There are some great examples from a lot of different situations.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much, Chuck. Go ahead.

>> My name is Hero from GJP. I would like to go back to not for profit versus profit. In a legal sense, JPRS is private for profit company with known public stocks. Our stockholders are the organizations that represent the Japanese community in a sense. They understand we pursue vision to contribute to the community, including social responsibility. So I believe there's no big difference from ccTLDs presented here except we need to return some marginal dividend that may be necessary to persuade their stockholders. So we define our mission as contributed to the community and publish it, which is pretty much the same as those of our fellow ccTLDs. I believe this is the common situation for profit ccTLDs as well, if not all. So please do not discriminate us since we are.

>> I wanted to bring about the question of access abilities and international domain names. I wanted to highlight the work that CNNIC developing voice command for mobile devices and the technology like that, which is actually done for one purpose, which is to prevent ‑‑ to help people with typing on mobile devices for. It actually has another application for helping people with disabilities or visually‑impaired people to use.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you. Pete the last word in 10 seconds and I'll wrap up.

>> PETER VAN ROSTE: For those interested in much more statistics than what you've seen on the screen earlier, please go to the pages below CENTR .org.

>> ANNE‑RACHEL INNE: Thank you, Peter. Thank you all for coming. Some of the things that I think we can keep in mind from this workshop is that as a big placard card here says, I do believe that ccTLDs are bridge builders inside their own countries in terms of the local communities that they serve. That is part of their responsibility. I think all of them said it. For profit or not for profit as Hero told us. Some of the things that I think all of them are doing is real education around the Internet. So as we've seen, you know, a lot of them do have quite a few people that are using those domains at home. But in general, you know, just like anywhere else. In other TLDs, the degree of appropriation of the Internet is still very low anyway globally, relatively when we speak. There's still not yet 40% of us connected. So there's room for growth. There's room for even more awareness raising, sharing their best practices by ccTLDs and being part of building this Internet that we all hope that carries on life and we hope will be secure, affordable.

Thanks for coming. We hope to see you in 2014. Thank you very much. Have a good day.

(Applause)