Danny Younger ha scritto:
Siavash,
Thank you for your reply. Allow me to pose the question: If there was one TLD for the arabic language, why would we need to have a host of arabic national IDN TLDs? Who gains from such a scenario other than ccTLD managers and particular governments?
Danny, apart from all the good reasons that others already posted, it is now a sort of internationally recognized right of a sovereign country to be associated with a ccTLD, and, by extension, with a ccTLD in each of its own official languages/scripts. This is one of the few principles agreed at the political level in the last years, and while of course it is not written in stone, attempts to deny it would be seen (rightfully, in my opinion) as the US Government stepping in to prevent non-English-speakers from fully enjoying the virtues of the Internet. About this:
I am concerned that the current approach may see entire language groups ignored while we cater to these two above-named special interest groups. Which ccTLD manager, for example, will necessarily commit to supporting Wolof? Or which ccTLD manager will make it a priority to support the Romani language?
let me say that while it might easily be that ccTLD managers do not cater to all the local needs, it seems even more unlikely that minority languages of a given territory could be an interesting market for the set of commercial corporations that currently run most gTLDs. I think that the best option for speakers of minority languages is to form their own non-profit registry and apply themselves, which is why application fees and other requirements have to be kept as low as possible (though existing registr* of course usually push for the opposite). It is unfortunate that ccTLDs are getting to IDNs before the others, but that's because their applications would be much less controversial than any other. Please note, however, that the fact that a country can be "entitled" to an "IDN ccTLD" does not imply that it should necessarily be the current ASCII ccTLD manager to run it, though I think that this would be the natural choice in most countries. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------