Suppose 20 languages or 200 languages may NOT be considered EVERY language, how about when we have two million languages? Someone mentioned that nobody is going to put every language in every equivalent of say ".com" translated. etc. or that English is the root language of the Internet.
The most frequently cited estimate of the number of languages currently spoken in the world is just over 6,000. This number is shrinking, not growing. (The rate at which this is happening is truly alarming and the potential of the Internet for reversing at least some portion of the situation has yet to be fully considered -- that's why IDN is so important to me.) The number of languages that are both spoken and written is significantly smaller. The number of written languages that are realistically likely to be proposed for inclusion on any level in the DNS is smaller still; in the root, even fewer. I believe that we can safely continue this discussion under the assumption that that number will be in the hundreds, and that any speculative quantitative effects can be calculated on that basis. However, very few TLD labels are words in specific languages. The ccTLD labels are deliberately restricted to a list of codes, and of the few labels in the gTLD 'vocabulary' that actually appear in the English dictionary, not all are defined there in the sense that the label is being presented to users. To be sure, the mnemonic TLD labels are primarily intended to evoke Anglophone association. Equally certain is that many of the designated concepts can be evoked using similar mnemonics derived from other languages. This doesn't mean that every single label will need to appear in every single language. Much in the same way that INFO has the same connotation in a number of languages using the Latin script, there are quite likely to be many mnemonic labels in other scripts that convey shared meaning across language boundaries. Locking the discussion onto notions of language may therefore not be the most useful basis for proceeding. In precisely the same way that the ICANN IDN Guidelines were recently revised to shift their primary basis from 'language' to 'script', I suggest that we focus on the matter from that perspective, as well.
2)- Unfortunately English is the default language of the Internet today
Yes, and undecorated Latin is the default script of the DNS. These are separate issues, and Council has to grasp the distinction. /Cary