China Creates Own Net Domains

Many governments around the world resent US control of internet regulation. To bypass that regulation, China has set up a new family of Chinese-language alternatives to .com and .net. The move could lead to greater censorship, or it could simply ease the search for words in Asian characters that go unrecognized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, the US agency that regulates the internet. A former Stanford professor in Singapore explains that China lost patience with Icann for not making internet addresses available in Chinese, Arabic, Korean or other non-western languages. For now, Chinese users can access both US and Chinese domains inside the country. But users outside of China can’t access the new domain, and such fragmented control over domains could diminish the worldwide nature of the internet. – YaleGlobal