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China Snubs Verisign In Domain Tussle
cswiii writes: "According to C/NET, Beijing has blocked international corporations from registering Chinese-character domain names.... including, of course, Verisign's NSI division. What will be the outcome of this one?"
China, fortunately, was the most likely candidate to do this, and I'm really glad they did.
.com, .net, and .org TLDs. Face it, NSI is a money-grubbing behemoth that cares woefully little about standards, or what the internet is all about - they have reached the inevitable end of their rope with domain registrations, what with added competition of hundreds of registrars, and having pissed off enough people (me included) for us to seek alternate registrars for those domains we had registered with them. What does that mean: less revenues for them, and like any company, they desperately need additional avenues of cashflow.
.com addresses - and since NSI is trying to have the monopoly on this (under the guise of an 'experiment'), they are looking to be the nly ones making $$$ off it.
Why?
VeriSign/NSI *ONLY* hatched this plan of 'allowing' foreign characters, in order for hem to make more profit, and thus add 40,000 new characters to the
Enter non-roman character sets.
Instead of having just 26 characters (and numbers), there's 40,000+ available characters that can be tacked on to
Regardless of their high-falootin' PR words of 'expanding horizons of technology' and such crap, this is just about more money for them - and absolutely NOTHING else.
The only domains that might, if anything, need local character support, or those local TLDs of the specific countries.
As such, it was just a matter of time until some country would have taken those steps, and now that China has, it is only a matter of time until Korea, and possibly even Japan will take similar steps (and there's more countries waiting in the wings) - the final result: Total fragmentation of the homogenous space that *used* to be the internet.
Personally, I hope that this will be enough to terminate this 'experiment' (which is what it is being biled as), and therefore the world can return to a simple use of the roman character set as the defacto lingua franca for the internet.
And I hope that sooner or later those fuckers from Network Solutions burn in whatever hell they believe in...
Harry
Which registrar gets to register Chinese domain names, no matter how they're encoded, will depend on how they get hooked into the DNS. I mean, are both the NIS and Chinese national registries going to be recognized by the TLD servers? Will China mount its own TLD servers pointing to their native registry?
The Chinese did something really smart here: They said that there's going to be a Chinese Internet, that's not managed by a spinoff of the US government.
Consider: both NSI (from policy/tech folk in the beltway core) and VeriSign (via RSA Inc -- think NSA) were founded by folk who left rather significant government bureaucracies knowing that they'd have a nice safe (and who knows, maybe lucrative) technical career ahead of them. But they never dropped all those government ties. ICANN was also shrouded in mystery at its birth, though one likes to think of that as bumbling rather than conspiracy. (Postel's death was unexpected, though...) For a long time, it's essentially been in the business of supporting NetSolutions.
Point being: there's not enough of a clear distinction between the US government and the Internet government.
And China is the first nation to have the balls (and opportunity, and technical need -- related to character set :-)
to say "fuck off" to the US Internet regime.
This is good for anyone
who really believes in plurality. Such as
preserving languages and
cultures in the face of the Western
onslaught.
In the West, we don't have the moral right to redefine other cultures in the way that "money is the only value" capitalism is attempting everywhere on the globe. Sadly, the only way to prevent multinational corporations from doing whatever they want is to erect significant countervailing forces. The US government has not been very successful as a counterforce, though maybe it's prevented some abuses.
Frankly, I hope a lot more countries start to develop strong lines between the US-biased institutions we have now, and institutions that reflect their own values and goals.
What you have seen was an "access denied" message.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The W88 warhead data was leaked under the Bush admin.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For more information, read Installing Japanese support in Linux or if you're using windows download the IME from windows update.
Better to stay silent, and let people think you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
--
Find free books.
Apparently Be Inc., maker of BeOS and BeIA, sued eBay for the ebay.com domain.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's something I was wondering...
Chinese character (or whatever) URLs would actually be sent over the line in unicode or something, correct? Then would there possibly be a way for a user without the proper language character set support to type in (or link to) the raw unicode version?
Is it really ethnocentrism or is it just Commie information control paranoia?
I can appreciate that "the Chinese" (since the nation-state doesn't completely overlap with the Chinese ethnic diaspora) would rather not have to pay up to roundeyes to register Chinese domain names. There's probably a distinct fear, especially in the realm of high-tech that China will be to the U.S. what India was to the British in the 19th century -- a place to extract labor from. So a certain amount of ethnic pride dictates that they have some influence over these registrations.
But their desire for total control also sounds a little bit like the "bad" China that wants to control information, limit freedom, and generally be a totalitarian Communist country like the bad old days.
So which is it? Legitimate ethnic interest or nasty Commies?
Would a ban on the Umlaut cover the diaresis too?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Heck, An American company (by which I mean a company chartered in the US) effectively owns and controls every domain name written in every other language.
Picking on China on this issue rather seems like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
This should have warned us.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
The best of course would be if domain names would be restricted to the strict English character set. Although I am not from an Anglo Saxon country I am convinced English should be the Lingua Franca for Internet domains. (I usually use Latin for all the rest e.g. naming variables, computers in network).
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
I'm as much for anything that limits the scope and reach of NSI as the next person, but this is a joke. What's next, is England going to forbid any other country from using english words?
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seumas.com
Sorry if this is off-topic, but if a site uses an non iso-8859-xx character set for the domain name, how do these get entered into the 'url entry field'? Having a browser display the correct glyphs is one thing, but being able to create the correct characters from a 'Roman' keyboard is another. I know that it is possible to input Chinese/Japanese etc characters into emacs (though I have never tried) but this uses its own multi-byte character encoding which I do not think would be usable in Netscape, Mozilla or IE (on any Roman alphabet platform.)
I plan to forbid use of piglatin in domain names. eBay (Be in piglatin), I would like 10% of your profits now. Thank you.
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seumas.com
someone at cnet pointed to a site called i-dns.net"
what they have listed under tech might actually be quite insightfull(even thought not technical) and may also prove the point that china can't actually block those other registration companies.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
A little integrity in domains is a good thing.
-- The unsig...
www.sonofabit.ch (For frustrating things)
www.scrat.ch (Everyone's got an itch)
www.tou.ch (.org site for blind people)
www.beowulfcluster.ch (added for more karma)
www.thathurtou.ch (support site for blind people tou.ch-ing the lit stove.
www.cou.ch (For the potato in you)
www.icken.ch (Pig Latin site)
Oh well... Sure hope ke comes up soon.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Apart from the obvious stupidity of banning a type of lettering, and even trying to enforce something like this, what do they think they can do? Just pretend that the Japanese don't have the same characters?
Better to stay silent, and let people think you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
Yeah. But you know English. What about those Russians who know no English? And I guess they aren't a minority. Why can't they participate in a Russian sub set of Internet?
They can, and do. It doesn't take a knowledge of English to type in a domain name -- especially if the name is actually a Russian word in transliteration. I started working with computers when I had the same amount of English knowledge as most of Russians did in 1986 (almost none) and still I had no problems typing commands and program names in English, as long as I could read and edit text in Russian. I think, it was 1990 when I actually became able to read English text more or less easily, and at that time I already completed few large software projects.
There are a lot of things where having material in Russian helps a lot, but domain names (just like program names) isn't one of them.Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.