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ICANN is under pressure to speed up the move to a multi-language Internet. China will make great efforts to encourage ICANN (the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) to support a multi-language Top Level Domain (TLD) system, a spokesperson from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) told Interfax Tuesday.
"The multi-language TLD system is important for us and other Asian countries to further improve the penetration of the Internet," said Liu Zhijiang, a director with CNNIC. "We will work with Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea to suggest ICANN enables a TLD system in our own languages."
China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) announced February 27 that it would modify the existing domain names system in China by adding top level domains in Chinese characters, which was enforced from March 1, 2006. "The measure was actually launched for us to meet international standards, which shows our intention to have Chinese-character TLDs," said Liu.
Under the new measure, Chinese users can type domain names in Chinese-character into Internet browsers to reach the website they want. However, the new system is currently unavailable to Chinese Internet users as there is no Internet browser capable of supporting a Chinese character domain name system.
Besides the browser issue, it is more crucial that ICANN add the multi-language TLD function into its root servers to enable the system. According to Liu, not only China, but also other countries are waiting for this support from ICANN to enable domain name systems in other languages.
"The process of ICANN in reviewing and evaluating this proposal is slow and sluggish?" said Liu. As ICANN operates under English language, which is the present language system of TLDs, it is speculated that "it is not so urgent for them to launch this practice."
"The launch of a multi-language TLD system is more necessary for us- as a Chinese edition TLD system would be much more familiar and convenient for Chinese citizens than using English language, and therefore, more useful for us to promote the Internet in China, especially in developing areas," Liu said. "Most Asian countries now have the advanced technologies [available] for multi-language TLDs."
Liu also denied that China would create its own domain name system in Chinese language, in response to a recent English report from People's Daily which misled readers to believe that China would use the .CN domain extension to replace .COM and .NET.
"The report about .CN domain name was "The report about .CN domain name was misinterpreted by the People's Daily, which also brought us a lot of trouble and inquires," said Liu. "It is impossible for China to split the global Internet domain name system and operate our own root servers separately."
At time of writing ICANN had yet to reply to repeated inquiries from Interfax.
http://www.interfax.cn/showfeature.asp?aid=10717
