Re: Thread 5: Defining the namespace (was Re: Thread 1:

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Kevin Brown allegedly said:
> 
> Kent
> 
> "single registrar is going to find it hard to have a meaningful
> >international presence..."
> 
> Huh?
> 
> The Internet means that a one man shop in the High Hill of Arkansas can
> compete globally with the might of IBM. We don't need offices with the
> Internet.

A common misconception.  You don't need offices, but you need to 
speak and write the language, know the local business practices, and 
so on.  A registrar physically located in Pakistan is going to be a 
lot more successful selling to Pakistanis than you are.

> Are you implying that registries need an office in each country that they
> accept registrations from?

Not at all.  You can accept registrations from whoever will send them 
to you.  But when the net really becomes universal you simply aren't 
going to be able to reach a substantial portion of the human race 
because of linguistic and cultural barriers.  So you can accept 
registrations, sure, but no one will send them to you because they 
don't know English and don't read your web page.

Shared registries deal very handily with this issue.  The person 
running a registrar in Pakistan probably needs to speak english to 
deal with his cohort registrars, but he won't need to speak english 
to his customers.  So he can register them in .com or whatever.

> Look at NSI. One web page, and all that .com cash. Single Registrar ( NSI)
> and they do have a MEANINGFUL International presence.

You've noticed NSI's German, French, Chinese, Japanese, etc web 
pages?  Yes they are making a bundle, but at some point they would 
have to deal with the fact that the majority of people on earth don't 
speak english.  The net as a whole has to deal with that fact.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F