India, China to be Internet's centre of gravity

Monday, 15 March 2004, 20:30 IST
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LONDON: India is likely to be the Internet's new centre of gravity along with China, according to the top official of the body that oversees the Internet. Paul Twomey, the chief executive of Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), says that the pull from the Far East and emerging markets such as India and China was becoming very strong. Twomey feels the changes present a technical challenge because the Internet was spawned in the US and then took root in the developed world, where the use of Roman characters to assign web addresses became the accepted norm. But that does not make the Internet particularly user-friendly in places where the English language cannot be deciphered, let alone spoken. "The problem with the Internet is that it's grown from an English-speaking view of the world. Our biggest focus is how to grow beyond that," Twomey said. "The biggest growth is in developing markets, such as India and China. "We're starting to think about Hebrew, India and what we call the CJK group of languages, covering Chinese, Japanese and Korean." The trouble for Icann, a non-profit corporation with authority over systems that connect computers to web sites, is that to use non-English characters requires a high degree of localisation. At the same time, says Twomey, there is a need to ensure inter-operability with the rest of the Internet. Twomey says: "The risk is that you could end up creating silos that are separated from each other. That's why we want to have a technical body to oversee it... "If you put it in the hands of individual governments, you inherently politicise it." The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the UN, is debating whether world governments should oversee Internet policy matters directly instead of Icann. A working group has been set up to debate the issue and will report back next year. Twomey says that putting the technical administration of the Internet into the hands of governments would ultimately create islands of information, rather than a single surfable web. "Governments have an important role in terms of public policy, crime prevention and content. But putting the technical elements into the political arena makes it a bargaining tool," he says. "The challenge for the Internet is not so much about what it is, but how to use it. What we need to ensure is that we embrace change but don't lose touch with the concept that the Internet is a global community," he says.
Source: IANS
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