Shouldn’t tea time for Kenya mean IDN TLDs?

Anyone who knows Kenya knows it is famous for tea. And while I can now get Kenyan tea online from US companies like Starbucks, Caribou Coffee or any number of other re-sellers, like most consumers I would vastly prefer to cut out the middle man and buy my tea direct from Kenyan companies. Why not?

But here's the rub. Besides me and a significant number of Brits, who buys Kenyan tea? According to Kenya's Department of Agriculture, after the UK the three largest buyers of Kenyan tea are Egypt, Pakistan, and Sudan. In fact, the Arabic speaking Middle East accounts for about 25% of world tea purchases.

To reach these customers directly, Kenyan tea producers really need the ability to "speak their language" on the web—to provide websites and web addresses that are all in Arabic or Urdu. However, since today's internet doesn't allow website names in anything but Roman characters after the dot, we've got to wait for ICANN to enable these Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

Monday night here in Seoul ICANN held a reception to celebrate the coming of IDNs for country code domains (like .eg for Egypt). It was a love fest, complete with cocktails, slide shows and commemorative t-shirts. And it's true, ICANN should be complimented for this advance—however belated.

Still, as I sat there talking with delegates from Kenya I was struck by just how limited a victory this will be—and what a missed opportunity it is—for existing and potential e-businesses. Even to reach their best Arabic-speaking markets with an all-Arabic website, no Kenyan company is likely to go through the trouble and expense of buying IDN domains in more than 20 Arabic-speaking countries.

So where does that leave the Kenyan tea industry? If I were the Kenya Tea Development Agency, Ltd I would want to keep it simple. What I would really want is the Arabic version of the website I already have—www.ktdateas.com.

In the end the issue of IDNs shouldn't be about linguistics or politics, but about economic growth and development, about making the Internet more accessible for the billions of new users and businesses coming online every day. Now that ICANN has committed to make IDN ccTLDs available, why not make the most common existing TLDs—like .com and.org—next in line?

If, as the proverb goes, "tea is liquid wisdom" then ICANN should have a cup or two… then get about the business of bringing global TLDs to the IDN space.

ICANN's Positive Affirmation: Good News for Africa and Emerging Markets

Originally submitted October 8 on CircleID

• Oct 08, 2009 1:32 PM PDT
• Comments: 1
• Views: 1,122 as of 10-27-09
  

By Andrew Mack

Sometimes you get what you are asking for. And this seems to be one of those occasions… and the US government can give itself a pat on the back for having listened to other stakeholder opinions.

For years the world of Internet governance has been seen as its own special corner of the technosphere, full of arcane acronyms and quiet power deals. Despite efforts to make ICANN and the broader Internet community more transparent and user-friendly, many observers, including many African governments, still saw the stage as too much of an insider's game—with the ultimate insider being the US Department of Commerce. However, with the announcement of new "Affirmation" between DOC and ICANN, it seems a new day is dawning, one full of what should be good news for Africa and emerging markets.

Notwithstanding its strange name (what is an "Affirmation" after all, when you're talking about new policy?), there's a lot to like in the announcement for both businesses and governments in emerging markets smile. The Affirmation talks about the need to move forward with Internationalized Domain Names, a major focus of the Arabic-speaking northern tier of the continent. It re-emphasizes the crucial private sector role in running the net, something that should give confidence to African investors and company owners anxious to do more on line and keep the net open for business. It expands the reporting from ICANN, so that now key information from the organization will be open to governments around the world, not just the US, making the governance mechanisms accountable to all governments. And in some ways most stunningly, it gives those governments that do participate in ICANN a much meatier role, complete with actions and powers to influence policy—as opposed to the simple "advisory" powers in earlier agreements.

Finally and perhaps most importantly in our minds, the Affirmation walks away from the very concept of a "report card", with short term objectives and a short term view. The Affirmation is an agreement in perpetuity, one that specifically addresses the concerns of the international community (notwithstanding the opt-out clause at the end, which seemed out of keeping with the intent and tone of the rest of the document). This is crucial because it is the long term stability and growth of the net—and both are key—that we are all after.

Now the challenge is to us. For years emerging markets members of the Internet governance community have been urging ICANN and the US government to take steps, steps just like these. ICANN has signaled a real willingness to focus to the needs and issues of the next billion users, on IDNs, on stability and on more and better governance. One can only hope that African governments and private sector representatives alike will take up this new opportunity and engage more deeply than ever before. After all the net should belong to all, even Africa.

This post was co-authored with Vika Mpisane, Chairman of AFTLD and General Manager of the .za Domain Name Authority