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

[Tan Tin Wee]

Milton Mueller wrote:
>>>> 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.

Well that's my point to explain that one size doesn't fit.
The reality is that some governments are elected, and some
are elected and disputed because of electoral "inadequacies",
and some are not, and some powers are backed by military might
as you pointed out, and as I cited in my examples. In all these
cases, they cannot be ignored if an IDN TLD roll-out that involves
languages and scripts used in communities within their radar screen
is to be successfully carried out. In fact, they probably have to
be engaged and actively so.

> 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.

Yes indeed, marriage might be dangerous, as is marriage of
convenience, or co-habitation or whatever,  but what is your point here?
My point is that while in some cases they map well, and in some
cases they don't, but they do map to a sufficient extent that we
have to engage and pay some degree of respect for the coercive
authority that they hold rightly or wrongly. In an ideal world
we won't have deal with this sort of situation, but as it is, we are unable to
take positions of political ideology or make judgements of rightful
or wrongful territorial jurisdiction in areas of technical coordination
such as IDN TLD roll-outs, which is probably your point. But
I am merely saying, even so, we cannot ignore that  the moment
one tries to deploy IDN TLD in the script which people in their control
use, one may have to talk to them about it. And if they do talk to
people who are influencing or deciding on IDN TLDs about it,
one should not be turning them away.

> 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 we are agreed here, and they can and should be treated in this
discussion equally (with equal favour or equal suspicion) just as
any other organisation 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,

And we are agreed here, as all I was asking was for some degree of
balance in the approach and attitudes we adopt.

> 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?

and as far as I know, under the ICANN process, IDN TLDs for Chinese
hasn't been sanctioned, whereas they have already deployed quietly since
four years ago, and outed early last March. As far as Arabic TLDs,
MINC survey showed they had set up their testbed for some time in a
pan-Arabic group, but these IDN TLDs are hardly recognised in policy making.
Cyrillic script users in Russia have also deployed and are trying to
include other cyrillic script users. etc etc. So
some have the support of their govts or intergovernmental groups and
they have been faster, trying not to exclude others, as far as I know.

Of course I cannot or for that matter, anyone else, can guarantee
they produce better results, but all I personally know is that I
had introduced working IDN technology in 1998, spent a lot of time
promoting it, and it is coming to ten years! The concept technically
hasn't changed, it is still ASCII at the roots and it is still
an ascii compatible encoding so we can be the judge of whether
our current processes have produced better results technologically.

And as far as I know, a) ten years is  not really going fast by Internet
timescale; b) while the current process is not excluding anyone,
the barriers for somebody who wants to be an IDN gTLD registrar or
registry for his/her script which only his/her group of people who
really democratically vote for him/her in an audited referendum,
are still there - cash up front, lawyers and legalese, lots of
travel to many places and expensive hotels, language skills in
English to argue one's case, etc; and
c) there  doesn't seem to be any concrete results to speak about,
let alone better results we can objectively compare or evaluate.

So had governments or intergovernmental organisations taken
the lead, the delay has been so long and any progress so painful,
that some might wager that it could have been so.

The irony of it all is that when I wanted to introduce IDNs
back then, I was motivated by the serious concern about language
as a serious cause of the digital divide, of how the man in the
streets of Urumqi might not immediately recall the ascii URLs
of yahoo.com on the side of a moving bus, and hence lose out on
the marvellous possibilities of e-commerce, e-learning, e-government
or e-whatever; but after such as long wait, may be non-ASCII folks
are better off learning English,  and indeed they have done so.

And unless our western-oriented mindsets (including mine)
are changed or internationalised ;-) things will not move
faster, people who have strange ways of thinking about things
will be excluded, and results will not be forthcoming.

The answer may lie in making a decision that instead of
prescribing exactly what these people ought to be doing in IDN TLDs,
we should be suggesting and encouraging them to make their own
decisions as to what they should be doing for their own scripts.

Imagine: we are opening up the Thai Unicode Block for IDN TLDs. All
Thai speaking/script writing stakeholders are invited
to the Thai Wiki site to discuss this in Thai, and
when you are done, translate into English, demonstrate that your
process included all key Thai language stakeholders (perhaps
including those in other IndoChina states)
and non-exclusive representation, and if we do not get
conflicting proposals from alternative Thai stakeholders
(ie. you have not been inclusive enough, or effective enough
to gain consensus), there shouldn't be any reason why we
shouldn't take whatever Thai labels in punycode that you
have selected and put in on the root server.

Simple principles of
Self-Organisation
Self-Determination
Self-regulation and subsidiarity
Transparency and openness
Inclusivity and consensus
Non-conflict with other codespaces
level playing field
minimal administrative, bureaucratic, financial or political barriers
competence, tech.... etc  any more?



bestrgds
tin wee