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?
There's an Arabic IDN consortium that should be addressed about this. From what I understand, there may be variations in the language from country to country. Further, there's a question of who the 'delegating authority' may be: Arab League? Arabic IDN Consortium? ICANN? Which company, based in which Arab country(or elsewhere) should run the TLD? Would this be a gTLD subject to ICANN rules? Would that be acceptable to Arab representatives in GAC? Could you get consensus on any of these questions among the GAC representatives of Arab countries? Note also that Arabic may be rather unique in being shared by a fairly large number of countries.
Is the public (user) interest best initially served by first rolling out one script per ccTLD, or by rolling out a series of language TLDs with no set territorial linkages (understanding that national IDN TLDs could be rolled out in a subsequent timeframe)?
If a language is mainly used in one geographic territory(specially if it is designated as official language), there's no reason why ICANN should by-pass that territory and set itself as the authority on what the best interests of that community are. If a language is shared by more than one territory, then there are probably sensitive local variations that can best be addressed in a decentralized way. IANA can help as coordinator for avoiding phishing possibilities, etc. And there's again a question of 'delegating authority'. Would ICANN, a US-based company, like to take on the Iranian government about the delegation of a Persian IDN ? By letting dot.iran be run by the present ccTLD which has working relationships with both ICANN(through IANA) and the Iranian government, such political problems can be avoided.
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?
The idea is, not to come up immediately with a perfect solution for all, but to set this thing rolling. Once it starts we'll have a better idea of what the salient questions are. Siavash ____________________________________________________________________________________Ready
for the edge of your seat? Check out tonight's top picks on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/
------------------------------------------------- IPM/IRNIC P.O.Box 19395-5564, Shahid Bahonar Sq. Tehran 19548, Iran Phone: (+98 21) 22 82 80 80; 22 82 80 81, ext 113 Cell: (+98 912)104 2501 Fax: (+98 21) 22 29 57 00 Email: shahshah@irnic.ir, shahshah@nic.ir -----------------------------------------------