Re: [Membership] Comments

[James Seng <jseng@pobox.org.sg>]

At 12:14 AM 30-04-99 +0100, Jeff Williams wrote:
>  First PGP is not a Digital certificate. PGP=pretty good protection. PKI
>or Digital Certs, such as what verisign provides as a third party
>Certificate Authority, is an example if you will of a Digital Certificate.
>And I have used mine on this very mailing list on more than one occasion.
>Review archives for more information.

PGP = Pretty Good Privacy. And no, altho PGP is not Digital Certificate,
they are based on the same concept technically. PGP just lack the public
key manager that Digital Certificate provides. And PGP dont actually just
do encryption, it does digitial signiature too.

>  FIguring out how to use one is not a problem, they are practically
>intuitive.  Acquiring a Digital certificate is not all that difficult either
>in most of the free world.  And in fact you can acquire one in China,
>a communist country.

Figuring out how to use one _is_ a problem. How much time and money are you
going to invest to educate the people to know how to use it? 

This brings me to the next point of notice, at this moment, membership to
ICANN have an unwritten 'rule' that members must know English to
participate. Are you going to claim "Figuring out how to read/write English
is not a problem, they are practically taught at every school"?

Take a look http://www.euromktg.com/globstats/ for the language
distribution on the Internet. The Internet is no longer a global village of
English-speaking or English-educated people. Thus, shouldnt ICANN have some
plans to carter for these non-English speaking people if they wish to be
truely globalised?

-James Seng