China Proposes Foreign Domain Name Censorship (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new draft law in China could potentially increase domain name restrictions, limiting domestic access to foreign websites. The measures outlined in the 'Internet Domain Name Management Rules' remain unclear, yet they suggest a marked effort to increase censorship on online content. The proposals, released for public comment by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, seek to update existing regulations to censor any domain names not registered within China. Only domain names approved by authorities would be permitted while other names registered outside of China would be blocked automatically.

Comments

Re:Fair's Fair

[itsownreward]

I was about to say, it might help fend off at least a few of the random scans I get from China...

Good luck with that

[phorm]

"censor any domain names not registered within China"

So what, only 99% of the internet then?

Re:Good luck with that

[Miamicanes]

They might allow you to register (intentionally-provocative domain name notwithstanding), but you'd probably have to comply with a laundry list of additional regulatory requirements if you did... like requiring validated government-issued IDs from any user who's allowed to post public content (possibly including users who weren't even Chinese or in China), and removing "objectionable" (to Chinese censors) content on demand (think DMCA, but a hundred times worse). And you'd probably have to pay some Akamai-like Chinese CDN to shepherd your site's content through the Great Firewall regardless.

And if you WERE willing to meet China's regulatory requirements for the sake of market share, you'd probably have to block access to most users in Europe, because the very things you'd have to do to officially get your site's content into China would probably get you fined by the EU for violating its privacy laws.

Welcome to 2016

[NotDrWho]

When everyone wants to tell everyone else what they can and can't say and see on the internet.

Get in line, China.

Doomsday Online

[ThatsNotPudding]

If there is an Internet Doomsday Clock, I'd say it reads about three 'til midnight.

Everywhere you look, on every continent, freedom and privacy are being hunted down, borne upon the cynical horns of terrorism and pederasty.

Re:China hasn't learned anything from the Empire

[the_povinator]

Not after we demonstrate the capabilities of this internet-filtering station.

DNS to build an IP whitelist

[tepples]

That won't work if the firewall drops connections to foreign IPs that have not been returned from a DNS query. When you perform a DNS query, the DNS server would then do three things: check whether the domain is on China's whitelist, return the hostname's IP address if so, and create a whitelist entry on the firewall for the pair of (your IP address, their IP address) if so. It's thus a little bit like carrier-grade NAT, except that DNS lookups are used as the trigger instead of a SYN.

Or perhaps I shouldn't have given the Chinese leadership any ideas...

Sounds like a feature!

[davidwr]

* Register domain that China government hates
* China-based script-kiddies can't get to me
* ???
* PROFIT by being able to focus my security infrastructure on more serious security threats (like the Chinese-government-trained/sponsored industrial-espionage-hackers???) instead of wasting time swatting the script kiddies that happen to be in China.

Now if only it was that easy to get rid of the script-kiddie problem worldwide.

I know! I'll use a Martian IP address!!!

"Ministry of Industry and Information Technology"

[VirginMary]

What is that? A euphemism for the "Ministry of Truth"?

Re:The Great Firewall [Re:Good luck with that]

[ChunderDownunder]

President Trump, ftw.

Not much different with trade, currently

[WindBourne]

Seriously, this is just like trade right now. China controls carefully what is allowed in to compete. In addition, if it is something that china wants the manufacturing tech to, they put up large import tariffs against your good and then requires you to 'partner' with a chinese owned company.

China continues to set up the situation so that they can sell outside of china, but from outside, can not sell INTO china.
At this point, WTO should step up and say no. BUT, they will not.

Re:Fair's Fair

[Altrag]

Define "success." Stopping 95% of the population from casually running across something China doesn't like is probably a success in their books. I mean sure they'd like to stop 100% but 95% is still a hell of a lot better than 0%.

Just like the lock on your door (ooh an analogy on Slashdot!) It won't keep out 100% of people, but nobody's about to be calling for a removal of all locks on all doors just because of the occasional B&E.

Of course that analogy breaks down in the sense that we generally value our personal security and generally consider censorship bad, so the goals of the two systems are kind of opposite (at least in the view of western internet users) but in terms of defining "success," it matches up pretty well.

I mean I'm not defending the practice here.. it would be great if information could be as free as it wants to be.. but unfortunately the vast majority of users are either technically incapable or just don't care circumventing these kinds of blockades and so for all practical intents they work great even if they're not perfectly sound in theory.