Internet Governance Forum 2009 - I - Day 1 Highlights

This is my first Twitter-style blog post about the Internet Governance Forum that is taking place in Sharm El Sheikh. The main session is currently on with less and less people attending, after the speech of a 'nervous' Tim Berners Lee and a super-boring Egyptian Prime Minister the audience (like me) cannot handle it anymore and they just gone out. So, the most important things for now are:

1- Sir. Tim Berners Lee, creator of the WWW, announced by tweeting it live the creation of a new association to care about the Internet called the World Wide Web Foundation. We already have W3C, but this one seems different and it will care about open standards and promote a royalty-free policy. Berners Lee said that "we are not looking anymore at the Internet as connected computers, we are not looking at the World Wide Web as connected pieces of Information... When you look at the Internet now you look at the people.

2- Minister of Communication and Information Technology of Egypt, Tarek Kamel (or it was the Prime Minister?) said that Egypt will be the first country to adopt Arabic domains starting from tomorrow. ICANN approved the use of domains in Arabic and other non-Latin languages back in October 30th, 2009. This was announced by a euphoric exclamation of the minister shouting: El Internet Btetkallam Araby = Internet speaks Arabic.

3- After the acquisition of the Jordan-based company Maktoob by Yahoo! Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!) announced that an Arabic version of Yahoo! Mail will be ready starting the next year, together with fully-localized version of Yahoo! Groups and other social platforms provided by Yahoo!.

4- Censorship case in the IGF: A poster of the Open Net Initiative has been taken down by security personnel. The poster was promoting a book about Internet censorship in China when a high Chinese official asked security guards to remove it.