[governance] RE: Caucus at IGF stock taking meeting

[George Sadowsky]

David,

You have made an amazing comment.

First, let's remember that multilingual documents, as differentiated 
from domain names, have been around for quite a few years.  The 
UNICODE consortium has been around since 1989, I think, and has 
worked hard to make a consistent and usable coding for most of the 
world's scripts.  They are in use all over the world. You are 
imputing to much importance to the IDN issue as opposed to the 
general multi-script issue.  note that links containing domain names 
are often hidden in documents, and clicking on a piece of text in the 
user's own script can accomplish the selection of a web page.

Second, you accuse ICANN of proactive foot-dragging with respect to 
internationalizing domain names.  I don't see any recognition that 
this has been a difficult problem to solve, or that the locus for the 
technical work needed to solve it is primarily the IETF, is an 
organization to which anyone clueful from any country can contribute. 
I see no recognition that there are significant stability and 
security issues in getting a good solution, and that doing it right 
is preferable to doing too quickly, having it break and then 
repairing the damage and doing it over.

Furthermore, you are imputing motive to ICANN that it really wanted 
to do this slowly and thereby presumably deny Internet access to a 
whole lot of people.  Do you really believe this?

Finally you note that "the practical prospect for connection by ~5 
billion folks has been effectively evaporated."  Do you mean to imply 
that when the IDN issue is finally resolved, that even then these 5 
billion people are forever banished from such connectivity? 
Evaporation is generally a one way process after all.

Perhaps you'd like to modify your observation, which may have been 
written a bit emotionally and hastily?

Regards,

George

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


At 1:09 PM -0500 2/3/07, David Allen wrote:
>At 9:52 AM -0500 2/3/07, George Sadowsky wrote:
>>ICANN does not have the power of excluding anyone from the Internet.
>
>Sorry, but this simply is not true.
>
>By proactive foot-dragging on multi-lingualization, over now quite a 
>number of years, the practical prospect for connection by ~5 billion 
>folks has been effectively evaporated.
>
>David
>____________________________________________________________
>You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>      governance at lists.cpsr.org
>To be removed from the list, send any message to:
>      governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org
>
>For all list information and functions, see:
>      http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance