Scrawled in Wax

Today ICANN, the body that oversees the assignment of website domain names, announced a massive overhaul of Top Level Domains i.e. the .com or .ca’s that are, in theory, supposed to organise the internet. The big news for lots of people is the possibility for specialised domains like .football, .travel or .music . While these changes are ostensibly about organisation, like the dot.com boom before it, it will in actuality be a lot more about branding and marketing. As it turns out, most .tv sites do not have much to do with Tuvalu.

But another aspect of the new rules is that TLD’s no longer have to exclusively be in a roman script which, for some inexplicable reason, a few people around the world have decided not to use. This is, I think, a positive step – as more and more people in India, China and numerous other ‘developing’ countries come online, they will be able to do so in their native tongues. Rather than having to learn English, people will now be able to locate their presence online in a language ‘of their own’.

Still, this all feels a little weird. After all, the fact that ICANN – an American-run organisation – had to deign to allow other countries to have website addresses in languages other than English is unsettling. What it makes clear is that there is a relationship between the centralisation of capital and technology in the West and the ‘culture of the internet’. It makes sense, certainly. If the ‘net as we now know it grew out of military and academic research in the richest, most powerful country on Earth, it is hardly surprising that much of the infrastructure and development happens there.

But what it does mean is that we have to be aware of something like neo-colonialism developing online where, in a manner very similar to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is a one-way flow of ideas and influence from West to East. It’s not that I’m entirely against ‘westernisation’ – that difference should be preserved just for the sake of it. Rather, I am suggesting that we need to acknowledge the interrelationship of economics and culture in which those with the most money have the most say. If we do not, we are likely to increase the sort of passive colonialism that has always been the negative downside to globalisation where western liberal democracies – and their attendant cultural reforms of individualism, competition etc. – are seen as the only viable alternatives for social and political reform.