In a move that ignores the U.S. stranglehold on domain names, China has announced it will start its own domain-name system beginning tomorrow, reports the People's Daily Online.
China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to add three top-level domain names: dot-net, and dot-com and dot-net.
The on-line newspaper says that this means "Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers of the United States."
The decision will affect China's 110 million Internet users, more than any country except for the United States.
The move puts the Ministry of Information Industry in competition with ICANN for the dot-com domain, although China will use a different character set.
Under dot-cn, two types of second-level domain names (categorized domain names and those for administrative regions) will be added as well, and seven categories: dot-ac for research institutions; dot-edu for Chinese educational institutions; dot-gov for Chinese government departments and dot-mil for Chinese defence departments.
There will also be 34 domain names for the organizations of China's provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities directly under central government, and special administrative regions, the Preople's Daily reported. These names will be composed of the first letters of the Romanized spelling of the names of the regions— Beijing's domain name will be dot-bj and Shanghai's will be dot-sh.
"The Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow," writes Michael Geist, a professor of Internet law at the University of Ottawa and a columnist for the Toronto Star.
He speculates that the move was made in the context of a contradictory atmosphere in Washington.
"Some might note that while Congress has been criticizing U.S. companies for harming Internet freedoms by co-operating with Chinese law enforcement," he wrote, "those same congressional leaders may have done the same by refusing to even consider surrendering some control over the Internet root to the international community and thereby opening the door to an alternate root that could prove even worse from a freedom perspective."
U.S. control over the Internet, he said, "would accordingly prove illusory."
The two systems could, in theory, co-exist if Internet providers recognize both of them, but the system would create a conflict if both roots contained identical extensions.
