.com will face more competition from local extentions in China

[rr5127]

China claims another 2 IDN gTLD's.
Singapore, 8 October 2008 i-DNS.net International, the Singapore-based company that pioneered the concept and technology behind multilingual Internet domain names including Chinese-character domain names, collectively known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), would like to congratulate the Chinese people and the Government of the People's Republic of China on their historic official launch of Chinese-character domain names under the top levels "政务" and "公益" signifying "government" and "organization", respectively. The forward-thinking and foresight shown by both the Service Development Center of the State Commission Office for Public Sector Reform (also known as Center), and the Ministry of Information Industry and Technology that authorized the Center, in helping the average non-English speaking citizen reach government web-sites under specific local-language top-level domains dedicated to government organizations is certainly a world-first.

But the world has increasingly come to expect such world records from China, especially in Internet-related progress. In the past decade, China has gone from less than a few hundred thousand Internet users to over 200 Million, with China now being the country with the largest number of Internet users and accounting for nearly 1 in 5 global Internet users. And there is every reason to believe that within the next decade the number of Chinese Internet users will exceed a billion and along the way Chinese will replace English as the top language for web-site content. Given that only about 1%, or some 15 Million people, in China are truly comfortable in English, the time has certainly come for the Chinese Internet to serve the needs of the other 99% native Mandarin-only speakers by way of Chinese-character domain names so that they too can use the Web effectively.

The most important benefit of the Internet is its educational aspect in disseminating information widely. A central component of such distributed information relates to information provided by government to all citizens, but particularly to the less-educated and native-language-only rural poor who need help in crossing the digital divide. By launching "政务" and "公益" Chinese-character domain names the Center has boldly taken a critical step in bringing such e-government to its native-language citizens.

With this launch we have come a long way from early-1998 when a team of researchers, led by Prof. Tan Tin Wee (a Mandarin speaker and a man of Chinese origin) and by Prof. S. Subbiah, at the National University of Singapore, first demonstrated the feasibility of a non-English domain name (IDN) which happened to be a Simplified Chinese Character domain name. From one test Chinese name on a small island populated by the Chinese diaspora, we are now poised under the Center's oversight to reach a million domain names for Chinese government entities and organizations that serve the needs of more than a billion Chinese people in the Middle Kingdom.
Long ago Confucius illustrated the strength of a nation in terms of the strengths of each of societies' layers and its responsibilities to other layers within a pyramid structure when he said " if each individual is strong, then the family is strong, if each family is strong then the village is strong, if each village is strong then the county is strong, if each county is strong the province is strong, if each province is strong then the nation (as embodied by the government) is strong". To update that in the more complex times of today, clearly an even stronger nation can be built if one completes the circle of societal responsibility and allows for the top government layer to communicate directly to the lowest citizen layer. Today, on the shoulders of the broader Internet and e-government initiatives, a critical small step - the introduction of Chinese-character domain names for government web-sites – is being taken to complete that circle of mutual responsibility.
Once again, congratulations Center. Congratulations China.
Dr. S. Subbiah

Chairman


i-DNS.net International


http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2008-10/08/content_1115527.htm

http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2008-10/09/content_114877.htm

http://big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5/news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2008-10/08/content_10166337.htm

 

[Phio]

We've come a long way!

And although many companies were dragging their feet, It's here. ICANN and CNNIC have already come to some agreements, look like they will need to make a couple more agreements for the .org and .gov chinese extensions before it becomes the wild wild west again like it did with the cctld's. lol

note: IDN's have been alive and well in most languages for 6-8 years. And with the fast-track to IDN.IDN this will truly open up the internet to the non-english population.




This is from 2004.






Online, CNET.com, 15 December 2004 --

by Winston Chai

At the end of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's hourlong address at the company's recent Government Leaders Summit, a representative from the Internet Society of China made the following remark in the ensuing Q&A session.

"Mr. Ballmer, now we still have to type in 'weather.com.cn' to check the weather. Most Chinese people can't do that. They just want to type in 'tian qi' (Chinese for weather)," he said. Short of a more concrete answer, Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft needs to work better with the various domain name authorities to resolve this problem.

The observation by the Chinese delegate is not a revelation, but it again brings to the fore the long-debated issue of internationalized domain names (IDN) implementation. Simply put, it questions the ability of the Internet to handle non-Roman characters, such as words in Chinese or Hindi.

The Internet as we know it today is built on a Roman alphanumeric script, technically referred to as ASCII (American Standard Code of Information Interchange) characters. This means that only ASCII characters can be keyed in to the browser's address bar, and these are in turn converted into numerical IP addresses denoting the millions of destinations on the World Wide Web.

This approach works fine in the English-savvy world. However, for non-English speakers, they could be faced with the unenviable task of rote-learning numerical IP addresses, which is highly improbable, or the English spellings of dozens of Web sites they want to access.

In other words, while multilingual content has swelled in cyberspace in the past decade, the method of Web-address input still revolves mainly around the English language, a sticking point which has yet to be resolved until recently, despite the marked progress of the Internet.

This leads IDN proponents to ask the question: Is it easier to teach English to the growing number of non-English speaking Internet population around the world, or do we tweak the current Domain Name System (DNS) to accommodate the language nuances of these users?

The long road to multilingualism
Unbeknownst to Ballmer and the China delegate, an effort to bring IDNs from concept to reality has been under way since the mid-1990s, but the journey has been staggeringly slow.

Tan Tin Wee, a professor with the National University of Singapore who spearheaded the launch of Pacific Internet, an ISP, designed one of the world's first multilingual domain name systems in 1996.

Five years later, Internet governing body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) formed an IDN Committee to examine the technicalities of multilingual domain name adoption. Despite initial patent squabbles, a set of standards was finally published in March 2003.

Instead of tweaking the current DNS and risking destabilizing the existing Internet infrastructure, ICANN's guidelines--formulated by its technical arm, the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF--dictate how vernacular characters can be converted to Unicode, an encoding system that supports around 40 languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. The Unicode characters are in turn encoded in ASCII for Internet transmission, leaving the foundation of the Net unchanged.

Years after its initial conceptualization, IDNs can now be registered with domain name registries like VeriSign and I-dns.net. VeriSign offers a hybrid "multilingual.com" approach in which top-level domains like .com and .net will continue to be in English, but second-level domains are available in local languages like Chinese.

I-dns.net is promoting a format that allows the entire address string to be in native characters, a method that appears to meet the need for multilingualism more fully.

Both registries pledge compliance with IETF standards and have claimed early successes with their new IDN offerings, with strong uptake in Asian markets like China, Japan and South Korea. The two companies also require users to install plug-ins before they can key in native characters in the address bar.

The online population is expected to reach 1 billion next year; speeding up the implementation of IDNs could help fuel the next chapter of the Internet's growth and open up immense opportunities for areas like e-government and e-commerce. Research already indicates slowing Internet user growth in developed countries, but in contrast, the pool is set to expand in developing countries for at least 10 years to come.

Major tech behemoths like Microsoft are ramping up language-localization efforts in an attempt to grow their customer bases beyond developed nations. This year, Microsoft launched a low-cost flavor of Windows XP called Starter Edition for five developing countries, and its efforts to get more users online could be further helped by incorporating an IDN-compatible plug-in in its Internet Explorer browser. In tandem with Microsoft's push, chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are considering low-cost computer blueprints for developing nations.

While foreign IT vendors are going local, top-level support for implementation and education on IDNs, however, seems lacking, as efforts have been sporadic to date. At a time when things are moving at Internet speed, isn't seven years too long a wait for IDNs to come to fruition?

The silver lining in all this is that the government in China has reportedly put its full weight behind Chinese domain names. With the mainland's economic and political clout, it will be of little surprise that authorities and companies in other parts of the world could soon join in to make the global Internet more multilingual and, specifically, more China-friendly.

Winston Chai is a senior reporter for CNETAsia.
Source: http://news.com.com/Is+the+Internet+truly+global/2010-1038_3-5491681.html?tag=nefd.ac

 

[Meongtae]

Is it easy for for the average citizen in China to order internationally off the internet?
What is the per capita? Do they actually order foriegn goods?
From all I see, there isnt much of a braket that has a high level of "expendable income".
Just asking,
Meongtae

 

[Phio]

China has a huge trade surplus, and the ability to buy all the banks in the UK and US, of course current laws keep that from happening. As far as per capita income, I believe the average is still low, but the number of millionaires in China may have already surpassed the West -- I've read it's a pretty high number. As far as purchasing on the internet internationally, I don't think one needs to be concerned about that because as the need arises western companies will find out how to monetize. Many companies are already doing it, like google and yahoo.

If you go to Baidu and type in 书籍 (books) in the search bar, you will see many ads displayed, and those ads lead to websites selling books. It's pretty much the same set up as google. Type 书籍 in google.cn and you will see only one ad. As google tries to get market share in China, the number of ads will increase, but Baidu is the number one search engine.

So, even though a large percent of China will not be able to afford online books, since the population is so high, even if 10% can purchase online books -- it's a huge number of people.

Looks like Yahoo.cn has 3 paid ads...

书籍.com
书籍.net were regged in 2000