The news has been announced today (1st April 2008) that English is to be the mandatory language for the internet. This has been decided by the CAIC, which stands for The Central Authority For Internet Control. The intention is that by 2010 all internet sites should be only using the English language.
The purpose of the regulation is to make the access to information universal. All websites that are not English have been given the timescale of 2 years to translate their pages or they risk being shut down.
In my opinion, it is an absolutely ludicrous idea that every page on the internet be in English, surely that is forcing society to consent that English is the universal language of the world? There are many problems involved with it.
How much of the world's population use the internet? My guess is this percentage is probably quite high, and what about the people that cannot speak English, but use the internet frequently are they just supposed to learn English so that they can still use the world wide web. Only time will tell how effective this regulation will be in the future. As far as I'm concerned, it's an outrageous decision.
