China creates own Internet domains

by admin March 1, 2006 at 4:44 pm

China may be planning to break away from ICANN and the Domain Name System, after creating its own versions of several top-level domains

China has announced it is creating a new set of domain names based on Chinese characters.

China has created three of its own top-level domains that will use the domain names .cn, .com and .net, in Chinese. The domain names were launched on Wednesday by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry.

The creation of Chinese character domain names has led to speculation that China could break away from ICANN completely, and undermine the global unity of the DNS, the network of servers that resolves domain name requests.

“It means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of ICANN, of the US,” reported the People’s Daily Online, a Chinese Government-approved publication.

ICANN, though, declined to comment on China’s plans as scant details have been made available by the Ministry.

Full article: ZDNet UK