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Internet Language Barriers
from the American-monolinguists-untie dept
To get around the internet, you have to speak the language. And that language is largely English. Not that there aren't other languages that function perfectly well on the internet, but the languages that use non-English characters first have to agree on a character standard. So it might take awhile for an Arabic character standard to be set since the Arabic alphabetic conveys at least four major languages and is widely used in more than 30 countries. With about 4.5 billion non-English speaking people in the world, it should only be a matter of time before the internet is more non-English-friendly.
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Don't expect democracy
Supposing the internet leads to improved communications between Muslims, it could lead to the opposite effect, in which people compete to come up with more anti-Semitic, anti-American theories; more refined "crack cocaine" versions of fundamentalist thought. The internet has been a boon for Hindu fundamentalists.
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Death to the non-believers
Here's some video links.
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Pro-Osama Rap Video
http://www.ratatak.com/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?lid=14
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the usual Reuters trash
As usual for Reuters, the article is poorly written and gives the incorrect impression that it's talking about languages, while really the issue here is just one of character set encoding: how to standardize on a representation of non-ASCII characters in domain names. See http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/idn/learn/standards.html for an overview.
The point in the article about different but similar names is akin to the difference between British and American spelling of English words.
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