On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 06:28:30PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote:
You can fly into any international airport in the world and assume that the ground control staff can speak English.
In the same way, the lingua franca of the global Internet is English.
No, not in the same way at all. There is no treaty to which countries who wish to connect to the internet are bound, stating that they will conduct their business in English.
If we are going to be politically correct and insist that every NOC in the world be capable of communicating in all of the major languages of the world, the Internet will grind to a halt.
And if we are going to insist that they all speak English, we are going to be insisting to deaf ears; case in point, all the complaints here about abuse complaints being blackholed.