China tells capitalist scum to back off in domain name war

Wants to run Chinese domains itself

By Linda Harrison in New York • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 4th December 2000 16:48 GMT

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China has again scoffed at attempts by Verisign to control Chinese domain names - saying it doesn't want an American outfit running the show.

The comments came from Mao Wei, director of the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) - a government-supported domain name registrar in China. "We hope that Chinese people would have the mandate over Chinese domain names," he told a news conference in Hong Kong,Reuters reported.

CNNIC's beef with Verisign, which basically grabbed control of domain name registry when it swallowed Network Solutions earlier this year, is that it has not only infringed China's sovereignty, but that it's standards are not up to scratch.

Verisign started the trial domain name service, which lets domains be registered with Chinese, Korean or Japanese characters with the roman character .com, .net or .org suffixes, last month.

In response, CNNIC started a rival system with the .cn extension - it claims to have so far nabbed 820,000 registrations. The body says its standard is superior because the extensions at the end of the domains appear in Chinese. It has also been giving away the .cn ending domains for free, while Verisign charges around $6 per domain. ®