[Membership] Divide and rule by geography or language

[Joop Teernstra <terastra@terabytz.co.nz>]

Dear listmembers,

"people like Joop Teernstra, who believes that
non-English-speakers are "regional minorities","

an offensive mis-characterisation by Mr Sondow.

This is what I said, and it was in reaction to the suggestion of
"dominance" by his earlier post:
>I try to see what is going on, but what I see with ICANN is not a problem
>of under-representation of regional minorities because of "dominant"
>English speakers.
This in the context of the Internet and the fact that the majority of data
traffic is still local to the U.S.

Let the archive and the context speak for itself.

I can say this: speaking 6 languages, I am quite at home in multi-lingual
company, offline and online.
If I am in the company of 3 Germans, 4 Frenchmen, a Croat and and Egyptian
politeness demands that  the Germans or the Frenchmen do not huddle
together to speak their own language, but that we all converse in the
common-denominator language that we all know: English.

In the past, it would have been French or further in the past Latin.
The emergence of English as the lingua franca, used by millions of
non-Anglo Americans is quite fortuitous and timely for its use on the Net.
No, I do not think that the fact that hundreds of millions of Indians,
Filipino's and others read (and write) their own newspapers in English,
makes that automatically Anglo-American dominance. Not any more.

I am on mailing lists that have a readership that is 90%
English-as-a-second language, yet out of respect for the 10% that do not
know the native language sufficiently well, the others converse in English
whenever possible. 
It is English that enables mixed-nationality debate and conversation and it
is *a good thing*, better than patronizingly encourage each cultural group
to stay in its own sandbox.

If this makes me elitist in Mr Sondow's eyes, I'll live with that. It's a
pretty big elite.  Big enough to be a starter for ICANN democracy.
And that is what I care about.


--Joop--
http://www.democracy.org.nz/