China to split the Internet?

By Steve Malone

Posted on 3 Mar 2006 at 10:41

The People's Republic of China may be preparing to develop its own version of the Internet. The official Chinese People's Daily reports that the Ministry of Information Industry has made changes to the domain name system to introduce its own versions of the .com and .cn and .net top level domains (tld).

According to the People's Daily this means that Chinese Internet users do not have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which comes under the supervision of the United States. However, many people fear that this is a first step by the Chinese authorities to completely block the population's access to the Internet.

Last year at the World Summit on the Internet Society in Tunisia, the United States fought off a bid by a group of countries led by China to wrest control of ICANN and place it under the auspices of a United Nations body.

The Chinese authorities have also been stung by criticism in the US Congress over the way American IT firms have been complicit in the censorship of the Internet within the People's Republic. Chinese businessmen speaking at the country's Internet News and Information Service Committee blasted Western criticisms as 'unfounded' and based on 'ignorance'.

China is also introducing a number of changes to its second level domains beneath the .cn tld. These include descriptive names such as .mil for military and .edu for education etc. It will also be introducing 34 subdomains based on the countries regions. For example, Beijing will have 'bj' and Shanghai 'sh'.

However, it is the top level domains that will be causing the most problems as root server administrators struggle to work out a strategy for deciding exactly where a URL with a .com suffix should go. The news will come as a further headache to ICANN, which is currently embroiled in an internal debate over its settlement with VeriSign.