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China Prepares to Launch Alternate Internet
Netfree writes "The Chinese government has announced
plans to launch an alternate Internet root system with new Chinese
character domains for dot-com and dot-net. This may mean that
Chinese Internet users will no
longer rely on ICANN, the U.S.-backed domain name administrator,
and, as one
commentator notes, could be the beginning of the end of the
globally interoperable Internet."
This most likely wouldn't have happened if the current Bush administration cooperates internationally. Thanks a bunch!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Controlling the backbones will make the "internet" a lot easier for them to censor.
I guess google's bending over backwards to censor the web searching just wasnt good enough, maybe some of the citizens figured out how to use lycos. Nothing they can do about that but recreate the internet in thier own immage. But without porn...will it really be the internet?
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
The idea is user-friendliness and connectivity, but on the terms of the Chinese Communist Party
Chinese-encoded TLDs will make it easier for an increasingly-wired Chinese people to use the internet. It will also make it much easier for the Party to control exactly what happens on Chinese-language domains.
In an earlier age, Mao said that the Party must be in control of the gun. Now, the Party must be in control of the network. The effect is the same.
I can't help but view this as the fault of the US. Think about it. ICANN, a US organisation, has done little to cater to the wishes of China, even though they're a large (and growing) presence on the internet. I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese TLDs, they should have them.
ICANN needs to get off their high horse immediately.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
This move puts Chinese companies at a competitive disadvantage -- how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers? Will western companies continue to outsource to China if the country puts up too many obstacles to free communication?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Should not be a problem as long as their names include even one Chinese character, since I'm not aware that ICANN is even capable of assigning such names otherwise. At least I have yet to hear about any such names.
Strikes me that what they're trying to do is even further cut themselves off from undesired Western influences. They may well succeed -- for a while.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All root systems are totally optional. You don't need to use DNS at all to use the Internet, and if you do use DNS, you are free to use your own that is tied to no roots and assign domains to IPs as you see fit. The ICANN roots are simply the defacto standard. It's a system that nearly everyone uses to provide DNS that's accessable to everyone else. There are other root services, OpenNIC for example, they just aren't used all that much.
This is all much ado about nothing, as it always has been with these DNS debates. Other countries are free to create a non-ICANN root system and that system can be compatible or not compatible. If they choose, they can register only non-ICANN TLDs, and provide access to ICANN TLDs by mirroring ICANN's root file. They can also choose to provide alternate, incompatible registrations of ICANN TLDs.
Wether any of this has any effect depends on if any DNS servers add their roots to the list of roots they check. If most DNS servers never check them, they'll be irrelivant. If most do, they'll be relivant.
Within the borders of China, of course, the government can mandidate people use it, but on a global scale it's up to the people who write DNS servers, and ultimately individual sysamdins. If you admin a DNS server, you determine which roots, if any, it chooses to use.
If China wanted to control what their citizens could see and do on the Internet they could 1) set up their own DNS, and 2) Prohibit DNS traffic from leaving or entering the country. While technically savvy folks could navigate by solely IP or make partnerships with someone outside of China to get DNS information over non-standard ports, restricting use of DNS would be a highly effective control.
...how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers?
You should be asking the question the other way around:
How can foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers connect to them?
Clearly, China has made a calculated decision that these parties need China more than China needs them, and that steps will be taken to accommodate the problem...
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
The problem is that the term communism is used to justify a totalitarian government. True communist philosophy didn't envision an all powerfull government controlling every aspect of its people's lives. Instead of the working class rising up to overthrow the oppressive aristocracy, a new aristocracy came along and said "oh by the way, you're going to be communist now", and slapped the word People's in front of everything.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
And on the other hand you have a lot of not so computer-literate chinese who enter chinese characters via a kind of touchpad and don't know latin characters. How the fuck are they supposed to insert [$LATIN_CHARACTER] in a URL? Not everything in the world revolves around some silly 26 character set.
Move Sig. For great justice.
Maybe you should ask yourself how many American people have set a different DNS server, or have installed an alternative application for a common task (say, a webbrowser, a wordprocessor) against "the mainstream".
Sure, some geeks may do this. But (certainly after some time) the vast majority of users just has the system configured "as it is supposed to be" (or as it comes by default).
There is one huge advantage in this for them; The Great Firewall turns from being a blacklist to a whitelist. Instead of blocking sites based on reports or automatic scanning of content, allowed sites would have to be enabled on the Chinese DNS system. Their DNS would know to delegate to the global DNS system for those domains, meaning transparent connectivity to the remainder of the internet. Where permitted.
The rest of the world could mess with this by replacing web links with IPs. However that isn't going to happen unless DNS gets really broken. BUT....in world politics, showing face is important. Depending on a foreign power for DNS isn't appealing to most countries, especially when the current maintainer has been acting a little differently lately. Europe has made requests to be more involved in the management of the system, largely for the same reason.
I often defend China on the intarwebs. It's an amazing culture going back 3,000 years. Unfortunately some people like Mao made some really bad calls with regard to the betterment of their population. This is only recent history. The Chinese are a strong nation and it is generally agreed upon that as a nation they are going to become increasingly a larger player in world affairs. Like the US of old, they are very insular. This is changing as a result of the world changing via technologies such as the internet and increasing world trade and commericialisation. China has special economic zones that are essentially capitalist. They cannot censor the internet, it's simply not possible to a) monitor it all or b) stay ahead of disident techniques. This war will have many casualties in terms of students getting locked up and the like, but I honestly do believe that the Chinese people of 2016 will be very different to the current ones. The whole totalatarism thing is played out over there. It's our turn now.