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China Prepares to Launch Alternate Internet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the aided-by-google-no-doubt dept.

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."

3 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. A long time coming... by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Given the intransigence the U.S. has displayed in the past regarding control of TLDs, this move isn't all that surprising. It is somewhat surprising, however, that China has chosen .com and .net as two of their TLDs, virtually guaranteeing operability problems with the rest of the Internet. While this manufactured difficulty is obviously by design, the motive remains unclear. Do the Chinese wish to:

    • create their own internet, by design incompatible with the rest of the world,
    • cause as much trouble as possible for the 'other' internet, or
    • a combination of the two?

    One thing is for sure...network administrators will have an interesting time trying to reconcile the conflicting TLDs .com and .net. Perhaps the fact that the Chinese TLDs are in the Chinese character set can be used to some effect, but I'm not certain.

    Wha I am certain of is this: when I'm in charge, we'll have none of this 'multiple language' crap. Everyone will speak Esperanto, or else.
    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

  2. Re:Very simple: China is simply going to win... by Pii · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Maybe I'm missing something... I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on how DNS works.

    If China creates it's own ROOT servers, which contain forwarding information for the .{chinese-character-for-com} namespace, and another forwarder for .com (in english) namespace, aren't we talking about two distinct and seperate namespaces?

    How does this break anything? It doesn't as far as I'm concerned. Someone tell me different, and if I get a bunch of doublespeak, I'll just call Cricket. (I'm dead serious.)

    Perhaps more importantly, if the Chinese decided to sever their connectivity to the outside world (and with the Great Firewall, they've had that ability all along), how does this hurt the rest of the world?

    China is a manufacturer, and an exporter. Insulating themselves from the global buyers hurts them, not us. We'll just have to get our paper drink umbrellas (and other cheaply made consumable crap) from someplace else. Wal-mart will be harmed a little while they forge new relationships with Taiwan, the Phillipines, Korea, and Maylasia... Barely a blip on the radar.

    --
    For those that would die defending it, Freedom
    has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
  3. Did anyone actually read the first link? by code65536 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I read both links, and I have to say that it's very cryptic. I think something got lost in the translation, but here is what *I* think they were saying...

    They are creating new TLDs to supplement .com and .net. The new TLDs will be composed of Chinese characters, so instead of blah.com, you'll have blah.[X][X] where [X] represents a Chinese character. If this is all that they are doing--creating new non-ASCII TLDs--then there wouldn't be much in the way of conflict with the existing .com and .net structure.

    But as I said, the language is confusing at best and I'm not sure if this is what they are really intending.