ICANN - GNSO - NCUC - Cambodia

[Norbert Klein]

Dear Phillipp,

I am sorry, I had planned to write to you much earlier.

Thanks for your mail – I had also read your statement before the first 
round of the election, and I had intended to write at that time, because 
of what you said about fairness. This is, of course a very wide field.

I would like to introduce myself a little bit more – though we met often 
over the years, I am not sure if I ever shared with you where I came 
from when going to an ICANN meeting. I started the first connection to 
the Internet from Cambodia in 1994 – from a dial-up system I created on 
a notebook, US$ 5.- per minute on a slow slow slow connection to San 
Francisco, and for three years I was the only provider in Cambodia, 
having about 1500 users by the time the first two big commercial ISPs 
were set up. - I am employed by a Cambodian NGO – the Open Forum of 
Cambodia – committed to facilitate and to foster communication in 
Cambodian society, not only by electronic means, though these were 
important to help break the decades of international isolation of the 
country – self imposed or enforced from the outside, as times changed.

Having done some “pioneering” things in Cambodia, I was invited to join 
the non-commercial constituency of ICANN since 1999, and whenever I 
could find sponsorship I participated – later as an elected member of 
the Executive Committee of NCUC (and its predecessor) and from there 
sent into the GNSO Council.

Considering your candidacy for the ICANN Board, I do not want to ask 
some of the standard policy questions, but I would rather like to ask to 
kindly send some comments back about an experience I had recently. If 
you find the time to respond, however briefly or more in detail, I would 
like to ask for your understanding that I would like to share your 
response with the members of the NCUC. My experience relates to one 
concern of the NCUC – how to maintain and possibly extend the field for 
open and unhindered communication. Many people living in more advanced 
economies think that communication is often in danger of being 
controlled politically (which can also happen); here it is restricted by 
our economic environment – a high-school teacher gets about US$ 35 a 
month (thirty five – I did not forget a zero).

=

I did participate in the two UN Summits for the Information Society, and 
also in some of the preparatory meetings for both. You know that they 
had been set up, by a resolution of the UN General Assembly, as 
“multi-stakeholder” processes: for governments, inter-governmental 
agencies, business, and civil society.

During the last preparatory conference for WSIS 2 in Tunis, in Geneva in 
October 2005, there were many smaller working groups feeding into the 
plenaries, and one was on Cultural Identity, chaired by an ambassador 
from Egypt. After all the nice things were said which Geneva WSIS 2003 
had beautifully formulated in the first paragraph of the Declaration of 
Principles, comments were invited about “success stories” - how this 
really works.

I offered to speak, the chair recognized me, I identified myself with my 
background in an NGO, and then I shared what we are doing – after 
waiting in vain for years that the promises of a certain well known 
software company to make their OS and their main applications available 
in the Khmer language and script would come true. (I had been involved 
in finalizing the UNICODE standard for the Khmer script until mid 2002 – 
and since January 2003 we had to readjust our expectations to July, and 
then to the next year, and so on – until today: nothing.)

So I shared that our organization had started to develop free Open 
Source software in the Cambodian language, based on the UNICODE standard 
– we have now a browser, a mailer, the whole Open Office 2.0 suite, and 
a number of utilities. As the name says: Open Source software allows 
access to the source, and therefore the process of “localization” - to 
change the user interface into another language, and to allow the system 
to handle a different script - is possible and legal. The National 
Information Technology Authority of the Cambodian government picked up 
our drive and is promoting it, the Ministry of Education got involved, 
((by now we have trained 400 trainers)) and what we do is opening up the 
possibility for thousands of people who do not speak a foreign language 
to learn how to use a computer – and to use it at the place of work – in 
their own language, and without having to pay one full year's salary for 
the equipment of a computer with legal software according to the 
standard prices.

While I spoke, a person in the room went up to the chair, I was asked to 
identify myself again. On the strong insistence of the intervener (I 
could not identify her institutionally, but I was told that this person 
was from the official US delegation), I was requested to leave the room 
- and I was told that my inference that Open Source software is more 
suited than commercial software for localization is wrong, 
discriminatory, and not acceptable.

So much for the “level playing field” in overcoming the digital divide.

The gap is at present actually not so big, as almost all software, 
whatever is on a disk, is freely available on CDs for US$2 a piece – but 
since Cambodia became a member of the WTO, there is a growing threat 
that “piracy” will not be tolerated in future. But if this should 
happen, probably computerization in the field of education will come to 
a grinding halt for economic reasons (unless Open Source software is 
made the regular choice in procurement).

Pirates – as we know them from the movies – are prepared to kill to 
achieve their goals. We know about piracy not only from the movies, but 
it happens also occasionally that a small cargo ship from Singapore does 
no longer carry what they loaded before entering the Mekong River in 
Vietnam and come upstream to Cambodia. I cannot explain to Cambodian 
friends why it is compared to a crime of brutal violence, when knowledge 
is shared.

I know all – OK, surely not all - the legal answers given by the IP and 
business representatives. I live and work with other people who do 
neither know much about these legalities, and who have difficulty to 
follow, when one explains. But they are more and more part of the same 
global information society, for which the WSIS meetings were held, and 
for which ICANN tries to provide a service in a limited field.

I would appreciate some comments back which go beyond a narrowly defined 
ICANN mandate.

Thanks for your attention – if you read through my somewhat lengthy letter.

And see you in Marrakesh.


Norbert