Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

[Fred Baker]

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.