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.

If you have been following the debate over Internet governance over the
past few years, you know that while ICANN supporters (U.S., Canadian,
Australian governments; business lobby) and critics (developing world
and occasionally Europe) argue over the optimal approach, particularly
with respect to government involvement in the domain name system, the
reality has been that possession is all or none. The U.S. government retains
ultimate control over the system and thus the debate has been somewhat
academic.

China’s Ministry of Information Industry
(MII) announced Monday it will reform the country’s Internet domain
name system, which will be enforced from March 1, 2006. The revamp was
launched in accordance with China’s administrative measures on Internet
domain name system.

dot china, dot com and dot net in Chinese language part of new domain name system revamp

The new domain names system consists of
a total of 4 Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) including the
English language domain .CN and 3 Chinese-character top-level domains
"中国" (.China), "公司" (.com)- in China .com is used to refer to
companies, as previously only companies could register .cn domains –the
.co.cn sub domain system is not in use in China, and "网络"(.net).

The English language.CN also includes a
wide selection of third-level English .CN domain names grouped under 7
"generic" domains such as ".ac", ".mil", ".edu", ".gov", ".net",
".org", ".com", and 34 "regional" domains for different provinces,
autonomous, municipalities, as well as special administrative regions
of China.

China’s domain names at all levels can
be composed of English alphabet characters in capitals or lowercase,
numbers, with hyphens, or Chinese characters. English domain names
should be connected with a dot while the Chinese domain names should be
connected using a full stop in Chinese language character sets.

This week’s announcement certainly doesn’t mark the end of a global
interoperable Internet. It does, however, move one step further down that path
since in Internet governance terms, the credible threat is now real.