Fwd: Re: [gnso-idn-wg] Issues list item

[Milton Mueller]

>>> Tan Tin Wee <tinwee at BIC.NUS.EDU.SG> 2/10/2007 8:40 AM >>>
>As much as it is Avri's concern about anything that would give
>a government  or a govt sponsored organisation control over
>a script/alphabet, it is equally my concern too, about anything
>doesn't give any say in IDN TLDs rollout to an entity that is
>elected by a process from millions of people who speak a similar
>language and use the same script.

TinWee, although it has some merit, there are several contradictions in
what you say.

First, you appeal to elections but many of the governments you mention
-- Arabic countries, Thai government (military coup, King), China,etc.
are NOT elected and basically hold power through military force.

Second, the marriage of political authority, which involves exclusive
_coercive_ authority within a _fixed_ territory, to linguistic
groupings, which except for a few very rare cases (e.g., Korea) do not
map well to those territories, can be quite dangerous.  As anyone should
know from current and past struggles over "ethnic cleansing" and
nationalism the combination of governmental power and cultural identity
is volatile chemstry, to put it mildly.

So yes, we should take governments seriously. But we should not
romanticize all of them as the legitimate agents of "millions of people"
or as holders of some kind of special authoritry over people's cultural
habits. They can and should be treated in this discussion as just
another organization with a stake.

And the fact that Unicode failed to perfectly engage every authority in
every country should be recognized as a failure but is not a very strong
argument for a bigger role for governments, because had governments or
intergovernmental organizations taken the lead are you sure that the
process would a)  go faster; b) not exclude anyone; c) produce better
results?