Comments on: So where do I register ethanzuckerman.中国?

By: Steve Ntwiga Mugiri » Archives » CIRC ’suspends’ itself from ICANN

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 19:42:28 +0000

[...] Canada is the 2nd nation to choose to work outside ICANN with the objective of meeting national internet governance goals this year. The other, China, implemented “. . . support for new TLDs (top level domains), written in Chinese, not Roman, characters.” using “. . . Chinese-hosted nameservers independent of ICANN to resolve these addresses”. [...]

By: Sterling

Sterling — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 14:43:50 +0000

This actually gives us the opportunity to have some fun. The diplomatic license plate code in the U.S. for the Soviet Union was “FC”. All Soviet diplomats drove around in cars that had “FC” written on the plate, which drew smiles from everyone who saw it pass and thought of the [cough] Friendly Communists [/cough] within. So we could always map .中国 to .CMF, for our Chinese Mainland Friends. Heh.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 13:34:41 +0000

Ntwiga, I think you’re absolutely right – this is a signal that China believes it’s possible to create a Chinese internet independent of existing companies and institutions. Sterling’s correct – you’ll be able to reach these sites via IP address… but when’s the last time you typed an IP address into your browser. Unless ISPs around the world point to these alternative name servers, these new Chinese domains – whether or not they’re mapped into roman characters – are likely to be unread by non-Chinese internet users.

By: Sterling

Sterling — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 06:54:26 +0000

1) I like that we’re calling this “Sterling’s bluff”.

2) Unless I’m mistaken, these new Chinese TLDs could easily be aliased to Roman TLDs by other root nameservers. So “.中国” could be represented, perhaps, by “.ccn” or something similar.

3) Whether .中国 resolves outside China is something that the Chinese will need to settle both internally and with outside providers.

4) As long as the PRC does not also propagate a new protocol (i.e. something to replace http), all .中国 TLD sites should also be accessible via IP address.

5) The real issue here is that China has ended its adherence to global internet standards.

By: Ntwiga

Ntwiga — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:06:23 +0000

It seems to me that this raises a different sort of question:

China is effectively signalling that they think that they can generate enough content and usage within the Chinese domain that it does not concern them that the rest of the world would not be able to access these sites.

So, MemeFirst makes a valid point, the Chinese have called Sterling’s bluff but not in the sense that he and the rest of the world expected.

This question has always traditionally been framed in the context of “who will manage top level resources since whomever manages those manages the net”.

What the Chinese have done is say, well, we have our internal resources that we want to manage for ourselves and we constitute a large enough market and space with our own lingo that we need to do this for ourselves anyway since no one else understands and is willing to work on this problem that is specific to us. So, we will go ahead and solve it for ourselves.

The new question now becomes “how does the rest of world connect to these China only resources?”. The main set of people outside China who would be interested in these domains are people who can read and write Chinese and it would be pretty straighforward to manage access for this group using some type of gateway arrangement.

Might be me oversimplfying things though.

One things for certain though ICANN is on the way out now. The Koreans, Japanese and various Asian/Indian sub-groups who do not the Roman alphabet are going to be doing this real soon too.

By: MemeFirst

MemeFirst — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 04:17:00 +0000

中国.com

So, uh, is it just me, or did the Chinese just call Sterling’s bluff?…