China to Make Their Own TLDs
March 1st, 2006 by MarkThis just in from slashdot:
The Chinese government has announced plans to launch an alternate Internet root system with new Chinese character domains for dot-com and dot-net.
The three top level domains to be announced are .中国 (.china), .公司 (.com), and .网路 (.net). In my opinion, this is a wonderful thing. Despite what some people say about the joys of internationalization, I don’t see making people use a foreign language to use the Internet as a good thing. How would Americans like it if they had to type URLs in Chinese and append .美国 (.us) to the end of them?
That ICANN seems to have no problem whatsoever with giving the US more domains than everybody else, doesn’t help things much. Neither does the fact that the US controls most of the IP addresses available under IPV4, and that ICANN is moving at a pace that won’t see IPV6 working until the year 2256, give or take a century.
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March 2nd, 2006 at 12:12 am
Your post reminds me of another news in the telecom industry last year.
TD-SCDMA is a new 3G mobile telecommunications standard specified and developed by the Chinese corporations, ZTE and DaTang Mobile, with direct help from the Chinese government. It has got accepted by the 3GPP in November last year. This means aside from current 3G standards prevalent in Asia, Europe, America and other regions, China will either adopt TD-SCDMA as its only 3G standard, or, allow just one more space for another standard to spice up the market a little bit, so that people could think they have a second choice.
I think it’s not just a generalized “China wants to have its own way” or “China wants to view the world with its own scope”thing. Because of its enormous market potential, this country is actually trying to set up a new domestic rule that may one day become one for the world to follow.
Btw, Beijing is freezing, and I have a cold.
March 2nd, 2006 at 2:25 am
Sorry to hear about the cold. It doesn’t apply to making their own TLDs, but I think a big reason Chinese companies are so into making competing standards for 3G, DVD, and so on is patents. Why back DVD, when it means that you have to hand over a huge chunk of your profits to Sony? In other countries, there’s no choice, DVD and 3G are already dominant. But in China, where there’s still competition, nobody will want to pay licensing fees.