How to be a European non-European (The Problems of the Identity and Identification in Cyber-space)

László Fekete
Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration
Department of Philosophy
1828 Budapest,
POB. 489.
lfekete@ella.hu

"Ah! ah! monsieur est Persan?
C'est une chose bien extraordinaire!
Comment peut-on être Persan?"
Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, xxx.

The paper analyses the proposal and the request of the European Union about the creation of a new Internet ccTLD for the European Union (.eu) as part of the eEurope Initiative. The drafters of the document of the European Commission responsible for Enterprise and the Information Society deliberately use misleading and contradictory arguments for supporting their case. They indicate the creation of ccTLD .eu for the European Union which can not be the subject of ccTLD registration. Their statement might have been correct if they had indicated the creation of ccTLD .eu for the European Continent, or alternatively, if they had indicated the creation of gTLD, for example, .eur, .euro and etc. for the European Union. The European Union has not initiated any negotiation about the .eu TLD registration in order to seek consensus with the more than fourty European countries concerned by this issue. At the same time, the European Union wants to set up its own new registry for deciding the rights of the use of this new TLD. Briefly, the European Union wants to have ccTLD .eu and to operate it as gTLD on behalf of its fifteen member states discriminating more than twenty-five non-member states which will have no access to the use of gTLD as the acronym of the European Union. The European Union plans to give the rights of the use of the ccTLD for the institutions, the business enterprises, and the private persons which operate or who are resident somewhere in the fifteen member states and to deny the basic rights of the majority of the peoples, the institutions, and the business enterprises to identify themselves in the cyberspace as the citizens, the institutions, and the business enterprises who live and which operate somewhere in the European Continent.

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