All English to Me
I'm not quite sure what this means yet - but basically China is introducing some new IP address suffixes to add to .com, .cn and the like.
They will be in Chinese characters, not Roman letters.
In a way that's fair enough. But in another it's not. Not only will it make it easier for the PRC to bypass ICANN ( and probably, therefore, easier to censor the Internet) but it's also a threat to one of the best side effects of the Internet - its role in spreading English.
I'm not saying this for nationalist reasons, though as an Englishman I admit to an interest in English. What I mean is that in this globalised world we need an international language - and it's English. It just is.
Here in Amsterdam I'm surrounded by people of all nationalities - in my block, for example, there are Slovakians, Bulgarians, a Slovenian, a Frenchman, some African people I haven't yet met and the inevitable Brits and Yanks too. Whenever we communicate, it's in English.
I'll always remember a boy in Malawi, who told me that he was a poor fisherman's son. But instead of begging for money, he asked for a book. I gave him an old novel I had, and asked him why. "Because," said the boy, in remarkable English, "if am ever to be anything more than a poor fisherman, I need education. And to get education, you must speak English."
The Internet is the best way to introduce English to China. Whether they like it or not, for 75% of the world's population it's easier to learn English than Chinese. And the more Chinese understand English, the more that they'll understand the world around them.
And the more Chinese who understand the world around them, the better it is for China.
And the better it is for China, the better for everyone else too.
Economist piece below.
Internet infrastructure
Chinese walls
China threatens to fracture the internet
THE internet is supposed to be strong enough to survive a nuclear war, but nothing can protect it from politics. Since its inception, its technical underpinning—the handling of addresses such as .com or .org—has been based on an informal consensus among (mainly American) engineers. Yet as governments have come to appreciate the importance of the internet, those delicate agreements are starting to unravel.
On March 1st China moved ahead with three new internet-address suffixes in the Chinese language, as national variants to .cn, .com and .net. This means that Chinese users can type Chinese characters for website and e-mail addresses, liberating them from the strange squiggles of the Roman alphabet, upon which the current addressing system is based.
Since most internet users today are not native English speakers, introducing other writing systems looks like a matter of digital decency. China's action will surely be repeated elsewhere—many countries have experimented with similar things but have resisted a full roll-out. But their reason for stopping short of deployment shows why China's move is potentially troubling. Unilaterally creating new addresses threatens the principle that any machine should be able to talk to any other. China's action is a protest against the way the internet is run.
The internet is managed by a private-sector body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), operating under the authority of the American government. Many countries oppose this, and argue that the internet should be managed internationally, as is the telephone system. Indeed, China's Ministry of Information Industries, via the People's Daily, trumpeted the new scheme as a way to bypass ICANN.
As yet, it does so only symbolically. The new Chinese addresses are still designed to function through the ICANN-sanctioned system, according to a senior Chinese engineer familiar with the initiative. And underneath the names the system continues to use numerical internet-protocol addresses doled out by ICANN. Moreover, the Chinese addresses are considered “temporarily set” in place; designed in other words, to rattle a sabre at ICANN (and America), not spear it in the belly—for the time being. Even so, China's actions threaten not just ICANN's legitimacy but the universality of the internet itself. “I hope that our colleagues in China will value the importance of global internetworking as highly as I do,” says Vint Cerf, the chairman of ICANN and one of the internet's founding fathers.
Comments
Thanks for including the Economist piece.
Posted by: dave | March 3, 2006 4:57 AM