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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 112 decisions affecting their ccTLDs, need to be respected, upheld and addressed via a flexible and improved framework and mechanisms.” 40 That assurance, that China has legitimate sovereignty rights under international law eased the way for the Chinese to join the compromise on the Internet Governance Forum and the process of enhanced cooperation. In practice, it is a de facto recognition of ICANN and the principle of private sector leadership for management of critical Internet resources. 41 The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) In the public consultations on the Internet Governance Forum, the Chinese representative proposed to include also the issues of critical Internet resources as a subject of discussion, a proposal which was broadly accepted. The Forum is, however, is not a negotiating body and has no decision-making powers. Its concept is to promote multi-stakeholder debate, to exchange ideas, information and arguments and to send “inspirational messages” to specialized bodies that may make decisions. Within the Forum, which first met in Athens in October 2006, China gave the issue of “cybersecurity” highest priority. During the Forum’s following sessio, in Rio de Janeiro in November 2007, the Internet Society of China and the China Association for Science & Technology organized a workshop on the “new culture of cyber-security.” There, Sihan Qing, Director General of the Engineering Research Center for Information Security Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a document called a “Framework on World Norm of Internet (Version 2.0).” That document is drafted like an international treaty, with rights and duties for various stakeholders. The author says he does not intend to present it as a draft convention. It is “neither a legislative regulation, nor a technical standard, it is rather a self-disciplinary agreement,” Sihan Qing said. Among its proposed principles are: • It is requested that all information created for, and contributed to, the Internet be trustworthy and valuable for the evolution of human being and world prosperity. • The contents created for, and contributed to, the Internet should be trustworthy and valuable for maintaining human ethics and morality, for the protection of privacy and human rights, for the protection of all people, particularly women and children, disabled people and weak groups of people. • The contents created for, and contributed to, the Internet should be trustworthy and valuable to all nations and people, regardless of race or creed. • It is requested that network operators take on responsibility to keep the high reliability and high quality of services. • It is requested that the users of Internet strictly observe the related regulations when accessing and utilizing the Internet. • All nations and individuals should go along shoulder-to-shoulder to take all measures to defeat various attacks and cyber-crimes, such as Trojans, viruses, worms, spyware, spam and phishing. The document calls for a new international Internet authority to monitor the quality of services, diagnose operational faults and arbitrate disputes. 42 The proposed “Framework on World Norm Internet 2.0” has not so far received formal backing of the Chinese government. As noted above, the Internet Governance Forum is not a decisionmaking body and formal proposals such as the framework are not subjects of negotiation. But the drafters have said they hope it will eventually be adopted - where and by whom being left open. It
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 113 remains to be seen whether such ideas will stimulate further debate and lead to political actions in relevant institutions and organizations, including intergovernmental organizations. Looking to the future: Toward a fragmented Internet? How will the Internet look in 10 years and what role China will play in the Internet of the future? The list of challenges is long: Access, cyber-security, diversity, openness, next-generation networks, network neutrality, non-fixed location radio frequency identification, mobile Internet etc. When it comes to management of critical Internet resources, there are two key issues in which China will have to play a crucial role: internationalized domain names (iDNs) and IPv6 addresses. One of the key Internet problems for China is the introduction of internationalized domain names. When the domain name system was invented by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris 25 years ago, it was based on the ASCII code, a shortened version of the Latin alphabet. This has put individuals and institutions using non-Latin characters in their national languages at a disadvantage. Use of local languages in the addressing system is also a crucial element to bring nations with languages not based on the ASCII code into the Internet more efficiently. Technical experiments with internationalized domain names started in the 1990s, mainly within the Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-governmental Internet standardization body of technicians and engineers. After 2000, ICANN started a special program to implement international domain names, both at the secondary and the primary (top) levels (iDN.iDN). 43 But while internationalized domain names on the secondary domain level were introduced in 2004, their introduction on the top level created unexpected technical and political problems. Some experts, like Jon Klensin of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the umbrella organization of the Internet Engineering Task Force, pointed to the enormous challenge for the capacity of routers if they must deal with different language tables with hundreds of non-ASCII characters. He warned of “cosmic confusion” and a collapse of the domain name system. But ICANN`s so-called JCK (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) working group concluded that the technical problems related to language tables in scripts with symbols instead of Latin letters could be managed. Next to the technical problems, the issue of “ownership of a language” became a political issue. Established generic top-level domain registries like VeriSign, the registry for .com or .net, argued that their gTLD may be considered a trademark that should have protection in all language variations, including Chinese. Alternatively, China's representatives argued that the Chinese language is owned by the Chinese people. Regardless of numerous workshops, studies and working groups, implementation within ICANN did not move forward at high speed. China was dissatisfied with the slow progress in ICANN and developed its own system. In March 2006, the China Internet Network Information Center tested internationalized domain names on the top-level domain system, so-called “Chinese domain names.” 44 The first test was limited to .cn, .net and .com with Chinese characters. The Network Information Center established its own root server system to manage communication amongst the new top-level domains. Linkage to the global legacy root server system was guaranteed by a special procedure that added automatically in each query, the ASCII-based .cn top-level domain to an iDN.iDN address. This was not visible for the user in the Chinese mainland, and it only created problems for Chinese users outside of China if they forgot to add the .cn in ASCII to the e-mail or web-address with Chinese characters. Reports on the results of this test were not available at this writing.
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