What's New: Update: China To Take Over Internet

Apparently earlier reports from China's official newspaper were incorrect in stating that China's Ministry of Information has established a new domain name system that potentially could render any Internet server outside China inaccessible.

According to People's Daily Online, the web site of China's official newspaper, the move was so that Chinese "don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States." ICANN is the international body that is in charge of assigning top level domain names like ".com" and ".net," as well as IP addresses. The report stated that China plans to run their own versions of the ".com" and ".net" domains, meaning that a business with a domain name in that category could find their domain points to a very different web site for users inside China.

However after the Chinese paper published their report, ICANN officials contacted the Chinese Internet Network Information Center, and were told there were no plans to "take over" official top level domains. ICANN speculated that the report may have been a misunderstanding of China's plan to expand use of its country domain with second level domains such as ".com.cn" and ".net.cn."

Wednesday, Mar 1, 2006 06:14 pm CST

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