Dear Bill, I find it commendable, that you are putting time and effort into the project to extend the number of languages. In general I'm all favour for supporting minorities. In the case of TLDs, however, I wonder if this effort is really making any difference in practise. If a language only has 100,000 speakers, how many of them would likely register a domain name under a non-ASCII TLD? Already now the number of domain registrations in IDN TLDs is much lower than for ASCII TLDs. And even for ASCII TLDs the number of people registering domains is not very high. I compared some figures and found that the number of domains in respect to the population is 0.1% (for some arbitrary TLDs I checked, this is of course not a representable research). For IDN TLDs the number is likely to be much lower. But even with 0.1% and a population of 100,000, this would lead to 100 domain registration ... for an ASCII TLD. I honestly doubt that interest in applying for such TLDs would be high, if the expected number of domains remains below 100. Finally, speakers of such a language are not per se excluded from applying for a TLD in their language. Just a small percentage of words would be excluded (namely those having a letter that is not already in our repertoire). Together with the fact (as Sarmad just said) that for each of those additional languages we need to find positive evidence for their inclusion, I would prefer to keep our threshold at 1,000,000. Cheers, Michael -- ____________________________________________________________________ | | | knipp | Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH ------- Technologiepark Martin-Schmeisser-Weg 9 44227 Dortmund Germany Dipl.-Informatiker Fon: +49 231 9703-0 Fax: +49 231 9703-200 Dr. Michael Bauland SIP: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Software Development E-mail: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Register Court: Amtsgericht Dortmund, HRB 13728 Chief Executive Officers: Dietmar Knipp, Elmar Knipp