Slashdot: China's New Internet

jaqian

Has anybody seen this Slashdot article? Apparently China is launching its own alternative internet from today!!! I wonder what this will mean for the future of the internet are we going to end up with a broken "inter"net, will each block (USA, Europe, China) have its own net?

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China Prepares to Launch Alternate Internet
from the aided-by-google-no-doubt dept.
posted by Zonk on Tuesday February 28, @12:09 (The Internet)
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.plsid=06/02/28/1610242

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[0]Netfree writes "The Chinese government has announced plans to
[1]launch an alternate Internet root system with new Chinese character
domains for dot-com and dot-net. This may mean that [2]Chinese Internet
users will no longer rely on ICANN, the U.S.-backed domain name
administrator, and, as one commentator notes, [3]could be the beginning
of the end of the globally interoperable Internet."

Discuss this story at:
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/02/28/1610242

Links:
0. mailto:netfree@pobox.com
1. http://www.interfax.cn/showfeature.asp?aid=10411&slug=INTERNET-POLICY-MII-DOMAIN%20NAME-DNS
2. http://english.people.com.cn/200602/28/eng20060228_246712.html
3. http://michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1130/Itemid,85/nsub,/

Karoma

With censorship as standard feature \o/

jaqian

More than likely. This is a bad day for freedom of speech etc in China and a bad day for the global internet community.

rogue-entity

Technicaly it is not a bad idea. People who use different character sets that like Chinese that cannot be easily translated into the roman alphabet have long wanted to use domains in there own charactersets, so that a particular character in Chinese for example would go to the site if used on a chinese computer, but the same site would have the option of using another domain in a different characterset for international users.

Also, I think it is about time that ICANN was forced to relenquish control over the Internet root. Total control over the Internet Domain root and IP assignment should belong to the international academic community. Exactly how I would reorganise the internet's domain and IP systems is rather tedious and TBH I have never given it much thought. I would have to consider what would be in the internet's best interest and what would best facilitate complete unregulated freedom of the net.