China Initiating the Start of Regional Nets?

Steven Grimm

Tue Mar 07 19:55:34 -0800 2006

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If anything, China's decision seems like the start of a new round of wild wild west days -- the disintegration of a single central point of control.

But this makes perfect sense if you think of it from the point of view of a native Chinese speaker. Or rather, think of it the other way around: say the Chinese had invented the domain name system and all the existing domains were Chinese characters. There wouldn't be that many, so you could probably learn them without a huge effort -- but it would still be foreign to you. In that situation a lot of Internet users would probably welcome a bunch of new Western-character top-level domain names.

China Initiating the Start of Regional Nets?

Alan

Wed Mar 08 06:32:05 -0800 2006

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There wouldn't be that many, so you could probably learn them without a huge effort -- but it would still be foreign to you.

Foreign-language TLDs are hardly an obstacle. Many (English) browsers just assume ".com" and will take you to "http://www.word.com" if you just type "word". A Chinese language browser could easliy do the same without changing the actual domain system And in any case, even using Chinese Windows you need to be able to handle quite a lot of written English.

As the BBC says, the motive is more likely to allow Beijing to exercise control over what Chinese can see or do on the Internet; with control of the domain system they can limit it as they wish.