[NNTP] Re: New NNTP drafts approaching IETF Last Call

[Kai Henningsen]

MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)  wrote on 24.03.05 in <Pine.WNT.4.63.0503241118340.1900 at Shimo-Tomobiki.panda.com>:

> On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> > This is
> > because this text is generated by national or regional authorities and we
> > have no practical power to order them to do anything; we can only
> > encourage. While a hierarchy works in KOI-8, they're hardly likely to want
> > this text to be UTF-8.
>
> What are these "national or regional authorities"?  In particular, is
> there *any* national or regional government which has passed a law that
> says "newsgroups are to be in KOI-8"?

Not governments. Usenet hierarchy administrators. From the point of view  
of the IETF, they count as "users".

For an incomplete list of administrators, see, for example,
        ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/control.ctl
and for a (partial) current list of groups and descriptions,
        ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/newsgroups
- you can see that various regions do use various charsets. To point out  
just some examples, is.*, medlux.*, sunet.* (national variant of ISO  
646?), tw.*, uk.* ...

MfG Kai