[governance] Program for IGC at IGF

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 08:04:56PM +0200, Louis Pouzin (pouzin at well.com) wrote:

> Let's recap history.

Being old enough to remember the period in question, 
a few observations:

> An early mail format (RFC733) was defined in 1977. It was ok, that
> is, for sending strictly ascii text. All commercial computers at
> this time featured 8-bit characters. Interestingly the internet
> format was based on 7-bit characters, thereby excluding non ascii
> alphabets, even though there were already ISO standards for some
> 8-bit alphabets.

There were solid technical reasons for the 7-bit restriction -
notably, many communication channels (some still in 1990s)
used the 8th bit for parity.

Also, there were attempts to support some non-English languages with
7-bit characters (like ISO-646 and preceding national standards),
although admittedly mostly limited to latin-based character sets.

I remember only too well how long it took us to move from ISO646 to
ISO8859, how hard it was, and transition to Unicode that is going on
at the very moment appears to be even harder. 

>From my (admittedly limited) viewpoint, ASCII-ISO646-ISO8859-Unicode
sequence has been rather amazingly fast considering all the hurdles in
the way, barely leaving time to get used to one standard before next
one comes. Thirty years is a short time.

> Do you think the unilateral control of the internet by a single
> english speaking country has been fair to other languages ?

No, but life is not fair. Internet was born (as indeed computer)
in an English-speaking country, which gives it an unfair advantage.
Had it been born in some other language region, that language
would now have the unfair advantage.

I see no point in trying to blame anyone for history here.
Let's instead concentrate on trying to make things better
in the future.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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