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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
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.
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.