As has been noted, the _hard part_ is making the protocol that is used between
countries' communications systems "language independent".
Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to make a phone call to anywhere
in the world?
I have yet to see a telephone dialpad that even has non-arabic base-10 numbers
on it (has it slowed the spread and use of the phone system?).
Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to postal mail a letter or
package to anywhere in the world?
You can't address a letter to someone in Berkeley, USA in nagari or amharic
characters and expect it to reach. However you can address a letter to someone
in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in ASCII characters with a poor-phonetic
approximation and expect it to reach (choice of locales based on experience).
At some point it's not worth the effort to "internationalize" all the
layers...will the lucrative returns on additional domains pay for such an
effort? and will that make an already "complex" Internet more accessible?
Does Babelization without language isomorphism lead to Balkanization? Or, "why
is machine translation so hard?".
Adi
On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 03:06:10PM -0500, Betsy Brennan wrote:
But the Internet is not the postal system nor the phone system. We already
have the postal system and the phone system. They may be slower, but does
that mean they should be replaced or that the Internet must duplicate what
these systems do? BLB
Dave Crocker wrote:
At 08:03 AM 12/3/00 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
I guess one of the first questions should be; "Is some partitioning of
the Internet community such a bad thing?".
Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to make a phone call to anywhere
in the world?
Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to postal mail a letter or
package to anywhere in the world?
d/
ps. strictly rhetorical questions, as I hope is obvious.
=-=-=-=-=
Dave Crocker <dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg Consulting <www.brandenburg.com>
Tel: +1.408.246.8253, Fax: +1.408.273.6464