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."

Re:sigh

[Kaa]

I can't help but view this as the fault of the US

LOL. You're funny.

It's pretty clear the Chinese government wants its own "internet" which it can control and which it can keep separate from the rest of the world. It's a control freaks' power trip.

I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese TLDs, they should have them.

What do you think the .cn TLD is?

Yawn, using it now.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no big deal, you guys are kind of funny.
Here is the information about it, it just finally went into effect I guess.
http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2005/10/11/3218.htm [cnnic.cn]
http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/ [tsinghua.edu.cn]
basically becomes this: http://xn--xkrp53d.cn/ [xn--xkrp53d.cn]
Or, as I see it from my end http:///#28165;&%2321326;.cn [http]

Basically, here's what they are doing, they setup their own root to handle the characters and these character domains will be routed to their own TLD, they will probably reroute other stuff they want to as well. Oh well, it's March 1st here in China, and there is no change I can see other than finally being able to use characters.

Annoying implementation

[billstewart]

(Summary of the English Version from original article.) [people.com.cn]

Creating their own Chinese-character TLDs for .cn and creating Chinese-character version of .mil.cn are fine, and creating Chinese-character versions of .com.cn etc. would be fine. Creating a Chinese-character version of .com is annoying, because it's in more direct conflict, and risks causing trouble to anybody with an internationalized DNS resolver.

I think you all misunderstood something

[amadeoh]

If you can read Chinese, the original article suggests there will still be Latin-based URIs, and they will be used in tandem with the new, Chinese-based URIs. I think it should be interpreted as an alternative provided for those who don't understand English.

The original article (in Chinese) is here: http://news.xinhuanet.com/ec/2006-02/25/content_42 25973.htm [xinhuanet.com]