BEIRUT: The United Nations Economics and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) said Monday it plans to launch a series of regional forums to bolster Arabic content generation on the internet.

This announcement came at a meeting of a group of ESCWA and League of Arab States (LAS) officials at the UN house in Beirut to unveil “The Regional Roadmap for Internet Governance,” professing an aim to bring stakeholders from various societal sectors into the fold.

A project to create Arabic domain names is said to top the expert group’s agenda.

The meeting comes on the heels of the UN’s fifth Internet Government Forum (IGF) that took place last month.

The IGF seeks to set the course of the World Summit on Information Society, a non-binding body that aims to set global Internet standards.

Debates around internet accessibility, censorship, intellectual property rights and cloud computing formed contentious points of this year’s forum.