Cultural diversity in cyberspace: The Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain | Gerrand | First Monday: "The history of the campaign to win .cat clearly began as an expression of traditional Catalan nationalism, as shown by the initial preference for a country code .ct that had no chance of being accepted by the ISO Standard 3166 or by ICANN.
Having been thwarted on that choice, the more astute protagonists developed the idea of ‘changing the passport for the dictionary’, putting aside any frustration with current political boundaries in Spain for the goal of achieving a truly global cultural focus in cyberspace for Catalan. Whereas support for .ct would have necessarily been limited to the region of Catalonia, the .cat concept was enthusiastically supported by 68,000 Catalan–speaking individuals and 98 organizations worldwide.
But the last hurdles to be faced were the cultural ignorance of some key individuals in the ICANN decision–making processes, and the sensitivities of ICANN Board members to the known sensitivities of the U.S. Government, which has the ability to veto ICANN decisions. The same political sensitivities and cultural limitations will face other language communities wishing to use the .cat precedent to win sponsored Top Level Domains for their own global language–based culture.
Winning a Top Level Domain will not be sufficient to promote much greater use or visibility of a ‘minority language’ in cyberspace. There are a number of important concomitant resources needed to promote the use of any language on the Internet. It is significant that the Catalans have covered all these bases through appropriate policies and investments." 'via Blog this'
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