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Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

2000-12-07 06:00:03
At 06:06 PM 12/3/00 -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

you missed it. Suppose you could not exchange in commerce with a person of a given nationality, not because you did not have a language in common with him or her, but because your system could not interpret his or her name. That would mean that you could not spend money in that person's direction, because you could not communicate with him or her. Although IP datagrams could get from you to him/her, there would not be a good way to determine what address to send them to. That would be pretty tough.