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"We were profitable and growing fast (about 120% a quarter back in Q1 2002.

Secondly, we had an awesome business model. Resellers all over the world were selling Keywords. Most uptake was in China, Korea and Japan where we were the only way to make local languages useable as navigational addresses. We had pretty strict controls on ownership but we were able to segment nations into seperate namespaces. Today we would do local keywords too.

Thirdly, we were doing 1 billion resolutions a quarter in Q1 2002. That was page views that MSN lost to us because we were able to provide direct navigation to a web page from a keyword. Microsoft decided to close us down in order to regain those page views. Search this blog for the story. There is a patent. You (Yahoo) own it through your acquisition of 3721."

I'm trying not to sound like a lingual elite-ist by any means, but can anyone really say that we shouldn't standardize on English/ASCII?

Yes. It's ridiculous to ask people to learn (admitedly a small part of) a new language to use a computer. Just because English is taught in a lot (not all) of schools around the world, it doesn't mean that everyone is comfortable using it. A truely usable computer should be one which allows you to interact with it 100% in your own langauge.

The internet has shrunk the barrier to exchange information, which has made diverse languages even more significant of a barrier.

The main barrier to computer usage in a large part of the world is that it is still an elitist medium - only useable (and affordable) by the well-educated. If you are actually interested in making it easier for everyone to communicate, then the main technical issue to be solved is how to make the internet useable by anyone from any background.

If we use UNICODE and just let accept that everyone wants to use their own language, then the internet will end up as a group of national islands of information. Each group will surf their set of native language web sites.

This already happens. Of course people surf websites in their own language! Because you (and I) only surf the English-speaking fraction of the web, you don't see it. All that international domain names adds is that a Russian accessing a Russian website can do so via a Russian URL. What could be more sensible or obvious than that?

If no standard is agreed upon, proprietory standards will pop up all over the place, and it'll be a huge mess. In fact this is already happening - although he's the current anti-Christ of Slashdot, the big selling point of RealNames was for non-English languages, and if you believe Keith Teare's account, he was shafted by Microsoft because they wanted to control (via their browser) the translation of non-ASCII names to ASCII URLs.

soz - the minutes are here

Interesting perspective from the man. Perhaps you guys could tell him your comments directly instead of chattering at each other.

Chris you are missing the point. Any reading of my WebLog at teare.com must lead you to the conclusion that the inability of DNS to support multi-lingual characters requires fixing, and that right now ONLY RealNames fixes this natively in the browser that is on 90% + desktops. Microsoft are now about to hard code the browser to Microsoft's OWN middleware - the MSN Search Engine. If you type "IBM Thinkpad" into the browser you will get an MSN Search result. Even if you do not like RealNames (its a free world) you have to acknowledge that ending up on the ThinkPad page at ibm.com is the right outcome. How you can support Microsoft tying the browser to exclusively Microsoft controlled middleware - and by so doing disable every language except English (7 bit ASCII actually) is baffling to me. Incidentally the business model you describe was abandoned many years ago. Keywords were $50 per year flat fee or $500 if it was a top brand with high traffic. Keith Teare Former CEO RealNames Corporation

It's now an unobvious deep-link into the archives

Also available elsewhere

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

It's now an unobvious deep-link into the archives

Also available elsewhere

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

On his private web page, RealNames founder Keith Teare sez M$ will probably integrate the functionality directly into IE.

Why am I not surprised at this?