Re: <nettime> Asia and domain names, etc. (@)

[david@2dk.net]

At 00:43 +0900 00.11.14, Diwakar Agnihotri wrote:
> last year a singapore-based company called i-DNS.net International
> introduced the facility of registering/using native language domain names
> - in chinese and thai - and in tamil this year (they also plan to
> introduce more indian languages). lots of non-english domain names have
> also been registered with the company. the company even submitted a
> progress report at the Annual Internet Society Conference '99 (INET), San
> Jose. why then did the Internet Society fail to advise this company
> against implementing its technology? could there be any politics involved?
> also, do you think language-chauvinism plays a role in such organisations
> governing the net? i'd like to know your views (i'm planning to write a
> story for our site, based on this "warning").

Thai is a relatively uniform writing system which functions within the
borders of the nation that defines/is defined by it. I would imagine that
it has enjoyed an orchestrated introduction into cyberspace. The question
of 'chinese' is much more complicated, and certainly chauvinistic.
Consider the linguistic elements of a 'one China' policy: The PRC uses a
character set that was abbreviated within a political journey never taken
by the ROC, where their writing system is more or less consistent with
that of a century ago. Add to this that Japanese and Korean both use
elements of this writing system, adopted piece and meal from across
(several) centuries which create a textual body not at all consistent with
any one point in this writing system's 'chinese' evolution. Their various
entries into the on-line world all include developing different input
methods for the Roman character-based keyboard, according to the
phoneticisation of their various dialects and languages. In all cases they
are double-byte characters, and need to be encoded first to be sent over
the single-byte (roman character) based networks of the 'wired' network
world. The encoding systems are also diverse. (There are debates within
each of these nations about uniform encoding, much less the kind of
problems that show up when databasing across cultures) Of course the
Japanese encoding methods can not be imposed upon the Koreans, PRC and ROC
and more than the PRC's abbreviated characters can be used in Taiwan,
Korea and Japan. Or maybe it's all a question of moving towards domain
names, each to their own encryption, like so many secure cyber wallets
whose every transaction is worth the money it's encrypted on, and then the
language of choice just won't be a question any longer?






#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net