separate bodies of content
Rebecca MacKinnon points to a detailed exploration by Steven Murdoch (Researcher in the Security Group
of the University of Cambridge) of how the new Chinese TLDs (top level domain names) are being activated. Murdoch finds that while this may not technically be an attempt to establish an alternate Internet since there is no new root server,
what China appears to have done is externally almost indistinguishable
from splitting the root and carries the same consequences. The primary
problem is that a link using one of the new TLDs will work in China but
not outside (without a user installing the plugin, or their ISP making
a configuration change). This breaks the universality of the Internet…
MacKinnon calls it a “Chinese sub-internet adjacent to the global one run by ICANN.”
What we might be seeing are the beginnings of the development of Internet search practices that are different within China than without, and the development of large bodies of Chinese-language content with .公司,.网络, or .中国 that are practically inaccessible to folks outside of China.
Nice design, but it would be nice to have a sitemap to navigate through pages easier. 1330705381