Hong Xue wrote:
An excellent point, but devil is in the detials. There is a Chinese-language community in US (CA) and a Japanese-language community in Brazil (SP). No matter how much we love the term "language community", it should be very cautious to use it in a policy statement. I'd rather suggest "The registry operator for an IDN gTLD/ccTLD must be situated within the nations and/or territories in which majority people are using the commensuate IDN scripts."
Agree that we need to have some formulation of this type. Unfortunately, it will not be an easy task, because we will have many different cases. What, for instance, if a script/language is used by a minority in one country, but there is no other country where the language/script is a majority? Anyway, I don't suggest we try to solve the problem on this list, my only point is that we need, in the interest of the registrants, call for some sort of protection of the communities involved.
I guess it may address Mr. Bertrand's concern, "Will the physical location of the future major registries for IDN TLDs (particularly gTLDs if any) give the corresponding national courts a specific authority/legal power on all registrants in those TLDs, even if they are not located in that country and have no business with its citizens ?"
Unfortunately, I believe that the likely answer to Bertrand's question is "Yes". Ultimately, the registry is where the essential data reside. If a national court of the country where the registry resides orders to delete (or make invisible) a record from the zone file, I don't see how the registry can avoid complying with the order. Of course, this will pretty much depend on what the local laws allow, but by and large, this is very likely to be the situation in the majority of the cases. There are countries where some type of information are more protected than others. For instance, there are countries where financial information are treated differently by banks. I wonder whether we will see a similar situation developing in juridical practices about domain name registries: i.e. whether some national laws will develop in a way to provide a different set of rules, and maybe attract the business of registries because of that. Cheers, Roberto