On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 05:58:53PM +1000, Larry Bloch wrote:
> Firstly, who pay's your bills? Your antipathy to businesses making a buck
[...]
> makes us just like everybody else.
>
> Secondly, I have no issue with the rest of your post - it's quite
> interesting - good research.
> 
> What it does show is that Belgium, Netherlands and Germany - three countries
> generally accepted to be advanced wrt the development of their internet
> economies have dramatically higher ccTLD domain per capita penetration than
> Australia.
> 
> The missing piece of the puzzle here is not what this says about the
> relative wealth of these countries, but rather how well supported their
> businesses communities are by the domestic domain name industry and
> regulatory regime.

You're missing one important but interesting thing, one which I
didn't know until I moved to Australia: The culture and language
barrier.

In Europe (with the exception of the UK and Gibraltar), when reading
english books and watching english movies, you always keep in mind
"this is not my native language, so things might be different from
how I have them here". Miles vs kilometers, dollars vs
(guilders/francs/marks), the Atlantic ocean at the east vs west,
dot-com vs punt-n-l vs punkt-d-e.

In the UK, and Australia, this language barrier isn't there, and
people pick up the jargon much faster and make it their own much
faster than localized versions. If 90% of the native-language
magazines advertise themselves on the cover as foo.com, people will
start believe that .com is the way to go. If life-style TV shows,
happily imported from the USA, constantly show oprah.com and
drphil.com as the place to go for more information, then people
will start to believe that .com is the way to go. It's being told
to them in their own language, they see it with their own eyes.

Educating them that .com.au is the right way to go will only more
give you faces like you are an idiot who has no clue about how
things are handled here.


Chello, an european ISP (don't know if they're still around), had
chello.cc for every country they were in. People wouldn't have
accepted anything else, because they associate .com with the USA.
Telstra uses bigpond.com (great role-model...), people don't complain.
QED.

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin§mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/