There are 1 billion of us. We should build our own Internet and lock out the English-language Internet! That was the undercurrent theme I encountered last March at a Taipei conference titled "A Chinese Language Based Internet Economy."

There is ample justification for the Chinese, and other non-English speakers, to be frustrated over their inability to access the Internet. They want to participate and benefit from this huge socioeconomic revolution. But the overwhelming majority do not understand English, or the other mostly European languages of the Internet, and they feel left out. For the Chinese people, the problem is worse because of their many ideograms, which make keyboard use nearly impossible. The Chinese, like all the rest of us, will have to live in a world of many human languages. What might they and we do about it?