[kictanet] Shouldn't Tea Time for Kenya Mean IDN Top-Level Domains?

[alice]

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20091027_shouldnt_tea_time_for_kenya_mean_idn_tlds/

Shouldn't Tea Time for Kenya Mean IDN Top-Level Domains?
By Andrew Mack


Anyone who knows Kenya knows it is famous for tea. And while I can now 
get Kenyan tea online from US companies like Starbucks, Caribou Coffee 
or any number of other re-sellers, like most consumers I would vastly 
prefer to cut out the middle man and buy my tea direct from Kenyan 
companies. Why not?

But here's the rub. Besides me and a significant number of Brits, who 
buys Kenyan tea? According to Kenya's Department of Agriculture, after 
the UK the three largest buyers of Kenyan tea are Egypt, Pakistan, and 
Sudan. In fact, the Arabic speaking Middle East accounts for about 25% 
of world tea purchases.

To reach these customers directly, Kenyan tea producers really need the 
ability to "speak their language" on the web—to provide websites and web 
addresses that are all in Arabic or Urdu. However, since today's 
internet doesn't allow website names in anything but Roman characters 
after the dot, we've got to wait for ICANN to enable these 
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

Monday night here in Seoul ICANN held a reception to celebrate the 
coming of IDNs for country code domains (like .eg for Egypt). It was a 
love fest, complete with cocktails, slide shows and commemorative 
t-shirts. And it's true, ICANN should be complimented for this 
advance—however belated.

Still, as I sat there talking with delegates from Kenya I was struck by 
just how limited a victory this will be—and what a missed opportunity it 
is—for existing and potential e-businesses. Even to reach their best 
Arabic-speaking markets with an all-Arabic website, no Kenyan company is 
likely to go through the trouble and expense of buying IDN domains in 
more than 20 Arabic-speaking countries.

So where does that leave the Kenyan tea industry? If I were the Kenya 
Tea Development Agency, Ltd I would want to keep it simple. What I would 
really want is the Arabic version of the website I already 
have—www.ktdateas.com.

In the end the issue of IDNs shouldn't be about linguistics or politics, 
but about economic growth and development, about making the Internet 
more accessible for the billions of new users and businesses coming 
online every day. Now that ICANN has committed to make IDN ccTLDs 
available, why not make the most common existing TLDs—like .com 
and.org—next in line?

If, as the proverb goes, "tea is liquid wisdom" then ICANN should have a 
cup or two… then get about the business of bringing global TLDs to the 
IDN space.

Written by Andrew Mack, Principal at AMGlobal Consulting

Related topics: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Multilinguism, 
Top-Level Domain