http://c'est_tout_bien.comm
So, the WPost says that the ICANN (the corporation in charge of the web's domain naming system) is conducting a test on Monday to see if URLs written entirely in foreign script -- none of this "هيلوجسي.com" business -- can work without, uh, killing us all crashing the internet?
But wait, there's more:The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and linguistic sovereignty, alongside accusations of American "digital colonialism," have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web.
All right, first of all, I don't think you should go and read the rest of that article. It's a really stupid article. With any luck, BoingBoing or the New York Times will come along and do a better job.
What really interests me is the text in red. [Emphasis added, obviously.] Linguistic sovereignty? Digital colonialism? What the hell is that? So I did some searching.
"Digital colonialism" seems to spring from a conflict between the government of Niue (it's a tiny island nation) and the US company that owns the .nu web domain. Apparently this guy named William Semich just, you know, rolled up to the ICANN in 1997 and said "Hey, can I have this?" and they saw that he was the first to ask for .nu, so he got the rights. Turns out NU is the country code for Niue. Now the .nu domain is huge, especially in Sweden where it means "now", and the company's annual income is ~$4 million. They give Niue a free internet connection, presumably in exchange, but Niue believes it's being cheated.
"Linguistic sovereignty" has a lot of hits on Google, and there are two ICANN emails that include the phrase, but I'm not satisfied that I know what people mean by it. It appears to be about people of a certain (broad or narrow) language community feeling included and enfranchised with regards to this language. Take that for what you will.
I can understand the anger of feeling like a foreign alphabet is making it difficult to use the web. (Especially all those right-to-left writers out there.) I would be especially angry if I thought that ICANN was callously indifferent about it. But this notion of international internets as a response... is this necessarily bad? Is it a "challenge"? Say we had portals between them. I can't get worked up about it.
p.s. Randall Munroe of xkcd claims that "blagoblag" is a suitable substitute name for the internet.
But wait, there's more:The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and linguistic sovereignty, alongside accusations of American "digital colonialism," have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web.
All right, first of all, I don't think you should go and read the rest of that article. It's a really stupid article. With any luck, BoingBoing or the New York Times will come along and do a better job.
What really interests me is the text in red. [Emphasis added, obviously.] Linguistic sovereignty? Digital colonialism? What the hell is that? So I did some searching.
"Digital colonialism" seems to spring from a conflict between the government of Niue (it's a tiny island nation) and the US company that owns the .nu web domain. Apparently this guy named William Semich just, you know, rolled up to the ICANN in 1997 and said "Hey, can I have this?" and they saw that he was the first to ask for .nu, so he got the rights. Turns out NU is the country code for Niue. Now the .nu domain is huge, especially in Sweden where it means "now", and the company's annual income is ~$4 million. They give Niue a free internet connection, presumably in exchange, but Niue believes it's being cheated.
"Linguistic sovereignty" has a lot of hits on Google, and there are two ICANN emails that include the phrase, but I'm not satisfied that I know what people mean by it. It appears to be about people of a certain (broad or narrow) language community feeling included and enfranchised with regards to this language. Take that for what you will.
I can understand the anger of feeling like a foreign alphabet is making it difficult to use the web. (Especially all those right-to-left writers out there.) I would be especially angry if I thought that ICANN was callously indifferent about it. But this notion of international internets as a response... is this necessarily bad? Is it a "challenge"? Say we had portals between them. I can't get worked up about it.
p.s. Randall Munroe of xkcd claims that "blagoblag" is a suitable substitute name for the internet.