Dot-CN root confusion
On Tuesday, there was much concern and speculation that China had just set up its own alternate root in order to run its own instances of the .com and .net TLDs. Fortunately this is not the case. What they have actually done is establish two chinese character TLDs for dot-com and dot-net without them being added to the root nameservers (hence, without ICANN’s support). Instead, they’ve likely just required adjustments be made at their ISPs - to add “glue” data for these new TLDs to the recursive nameserver configuration. While this is suboptimal - It doesn’t create the kind of confusion and seperate internet people are worried about. In fact, with or without ICANN’s help, If China allows foreign queries to their new TLD nameservers, anyone can add the appropriate glue records to their own nameservers and see the new domain names.
Lets hope that ICANN gets the hint and has these new chinese TLDs added to the roots. It doesn’t hurt anyone to do so.
