China Launches Chinese Language Domains

Information Management Journal, May/Jun 2006 by Swartz, Nikki

China recently announced it has created three of its own domains that will use the domain names .cn, .com, and .net in Chinese. This has further fueled last year's world argument about who should control the Internet.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), based in the United States, is the nonprofit corporation that currently is responsible for the allocation or management of domain names, Internet protocol addresses, protocols, and root servers. Several countries publicly objected to the power that ICANN has over the Internet because, ultimately, this places it under the control of the U.S. government.

The European Union and other nations demanded the United States share responsibility for the Domain Name System (DNS), including decisions over adding and deleting new top-level domains, with the United Nations. However, the Bush administration refused.

But countries that may feel left out by a largely westernized Internet are doing more than just complaining.

The creation of Chinese character domain names by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry has fueled speculation that China could break away from ICANN completely, undermining the global unity of the DNS, the network of servers that resolves domain name requests.

The People's Daily Online, a Chinese government-approved publication, reported: "It means Internet users don't have to surf the web via the servers under the management of ICANN, of the U.S."

The ministry has made few details available, and ICANN has declined to comment on China's plans. Experts are also concerned that China will administer its top-level domains with its own separate root servers, which could cause a split in the Internet.

Geir Rasmussen, chief executive of Global Name Registry, a domain name registration organization that oversees the dot-name domain, said fragmentation is a concern because it may confuse web users.

"Users might lose trust in the system if there are multiple versions of the same domains," he explained. "If someone launched a dot-name in a different root, you as an end user could not be sure which root you were using. It would be like having a phone number that points to two different people."

Rasmussen added that he would not be surprised if the Internet became fragmented because some parts of the world do not feel included.

"The Internet up to now has been mostly westernized, and some countries may feel disenfranchised, as they can't access the Internet in their local language," he said. "I think this is about accessibility. Think if all westerners had to enter characters in Chinese script."