Tan Tin Wee wrote: > Yes, indeed your .02 is correct, correct as of the standpoint > of a person from a richer developed country living in San Antonio > USA. For me, I understand that as a person in a rich developed > country like Singapore. It is not a hot dog stand, really. > > But for a developing country, do you think that a 1Million > dollars for IDNs makes any sense? they might as well train the > population to read English! Better value for money! Or save a > million kids from some horrible infectious disease. > And for IDNs, well, if we have to run it, we can only afford 90K. > Won't you consider this correct too? from their standpoint. > > For such a developing country, you want them to run a one > million dollar operation for a few tens of thousands of IDNs, > it is simply just not cost effective. So they might as well > back off. And then, what is the point for me to invent IDNs > and advocate it for the past 12 years? For rich countries to > take over and make more money out of the poor? > > Let's take a positive approach to things. Accept that the > digital divide exists. Linguistic, technical and financial > barriers exist. That's the reality of today's world. > > So to promote some desperately needed mutual understanding, especially > for those who don't know enough English for them to argue > successfully in the ICANN forum or in this mailing list forum, > can you guys not consider their fate, just for a moment? > > To you, TLD operator/registry is gTLD, loads of money involved. > Shouldn't you care more than 2 cents worth about the > poor left-out countries. So it took ICANN a decade to implement > the IDN market, lump it with lucrative gTLDs, and now to > arrange it such that only developed country entities can afford it. > And then to hear it announce to the world, we are bringing > multilingualism > to the Internet world, presumably for the rich to make more money, > make more money off the poor? the non-English speaker native > speaker? locked out of the Internet because of inadequacy of > reading English characters? > > If it is only myself that feels outraged, than I feel really sorry > for the Internet community. Maybe, it is time for me to leave. > > So if you want to do new ASCII gTLDs, go ahead and do the 1M operation > with CEOs with loads of bonuses, best practices, ISO9000 certified etc > etc. But for the poorer developing world who needs IDNs, can ICANN > consider > waivers and aid to help run "proper" non-hot dog stand registries, > or consider a more realistic level of operations that is a little > bit better than a hot dog stand, maybe $100,000 a year operation. > > Please? for decency's sake? Thanks, for helping to un-tangle some questions which seemed to be stuck in the assumption that the world is all the same everywhere, and there is a fixed economic context to be adhered to. For decency's sake - no! World-wide human society - even Internet and domain name operations - are different, can be different, and should be allowed and encouraged to be different. Norbert Klein Cambodia (1990-2010) -- If you want to know what is going on in Cambodia, please visit The Mirror, a regular review of the Cambodian language press in English. This is the latest weekly editorial of the Mirror: The Passing of the Anti-Corruption Law, and Planned Changes in Telecommunications Sunday, 14.3.2010 http://tinyurl.com/yavafd3 (to read it, click on the line above.) And here is something new every day: http://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com