Confusion over China’s domain names
A few days following China disclosed fresh domain names there are still lingering questions.
Fresh notes suggest that China isn’t creating a fresh domain name system outside of the existing one. They blame an english language story in China’s People’s Daily for creating the confusion. The question is whether the fresh domain extensions will operate under the existing .cn extension.
Although the fresh media notes suggest China is not creating an alternate route system, I’m not completely convinced that it isn’t mean to create confusion with the ICANN system. I read the official statements on the China Ministry of Information Industry web site. It was translated into english, somewhat choppily, so it was hard to understand. But it sounded like, even if the fresh domains are really second level domains under .CN, users would be able to go directly to the fresh URLs simply by typing a different character between the name and the “com”.
Perhaps this controversy was a good wake up call to what can happen if there’s a fractured internet. If nothing else, this is a good exercise to consider the implications.
