According to the article from Reuters (via Internet Policy), Khaled Fattal of MINC is asking 6M USD to solve the Arabic Domain Names.

WTF!? 6M USD to do Arabic Domain Names¹? I suppose CJK has 1000x more characters then Arabic, we probably should ask 6B USD to produce RFC 3743. Okay, maybe it is not fair to compare by absolute character count so lets just say 50x. I will settle for 300M USD okay? :-)

I was one of founding member of MINC. The original vision is to have an organization that can help faciliate and resolve the language issues with IDN that will not be tackled by the IETF IDN-WG. But after been hijacked by certain commerical interests, and then hijack again and again, I stayed away from them as far as I can. Where is the 6M coming from? Well, take a look at their submission to UN-ICT Task Force (part of the WSIS process). Their submission contains so many misrepresentations – (1) They have not publish any standard or policy; (2) They have no interoperability mechanism (the one they claim they did is done by Paul Hoffman sponsored by JDNA) (3) They have no RFC as they claim.

It seem they are more interested to crave a pie for themselves (proclaiming they representing the multilingual Internet) in the WSIS process on par with ICANN and ITU (haha) on Internet Governance. I don’t mind politics so long it produce some useful result. But I look down on those who do politics for politics sake without producing any real work.

My personal view of MINC has shift from ‘harmless’ to ‘dangerous’, especially when they tried to paint themselves as the group that should ‘govern the multilingual Internet’. Thanks, but no thanks…Internet Goverance space is already confusing as-is and we don’t need groups that add no value to the process.

Update 29th May:

Disclaimer: This entry is probably controvisal and likely to offend certain people. Nevertheless, this is my personal opinion and I urge readers here go through the docs and make your own judgement.

¹ “Arabic” refers to the script, not the language