[governance] Mandatory and non-mandatory governance (Was: China To Launch Alternate Country CodeDomains]

[Milton Mueller]

I found Bortzmeyer's creation of a distinction between things that do and do not need global governance to be important and useful. 

As I argued at the Geneva consultation, "multilingualism" is too broad a category to be useful for the IGForum; some of the issues in multilingualism are purely matters of local or regional development (such as developing new content in underserved scripts and langauges); others (such as IDNs) do involve global compatibility and coordination issues. It was somewhat disturbing that the recent news release from the UN about the creation of the Forum by Annan not only prematurely signaled that "multilingualism" would be a theme of the first forum, but seemed to emphasize exactly the wrong aspect of that issue. 

If the UN decides that real global governance where it is needed is too controversial for it, and instead concentrates on attempting to be a (probably pretty lousy) internet service provider, web host and content developer this will all become a rather irreleevant exercise, rapidly.

Dr. Milton Mueller
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.digital-convergence.org
http://www.internetgovernance.org

>>> David Allen <David_Allen_AB63 at post.harvard.edu> 03/04/06 10:54 AM >>>
Putting the question in terms of 'central, international action' - or 
coordination - is surely helpful.  In that regard:

At 3:54 PM +0800 3/3/06, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>At last you have some issues where it is not even clear if a central 
>action is a good idea. Multilingualism is a typical example. What 
>could an international organization do in that field? There are a 
>lot of things to do in the Internet to make it more accessible for 
>the non-English speaker: translating software, creating content, 
>etc. But is there one thing which *requires* or even would benefit 
>from a central action? I doubt it

Though the current case - China's native-language TLDs - is a little 
complicated, several posts on this thread have tried to unveil key 
facts.  When you get into that, it becomes clear there must indeed be 
some level of international coordination, for successful 
native-language access.

Hence multilingualism (defined as here) is one of those cases - one 
theme - that leads directly to today's post-WSIS, core governance 
questions.

David
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