Last night, after dinner hosted by Mao Wei, I got this email from Dave’s Interesting-People: “China To Launch Alternate Country Code Domains”. It was funny because no one said anything about the BIG news during dinner but nevermind, I could clarify with them in the morning.

By morning, this little email turn into small discussion on IPer and a dozen of bloggers jump at it. Three of those even made it on CircleID (gosh, do u need to have 3 articles on the same topic?) I spoke to Prof. Qian and he said has no idea (apparently he was also asked during his board conf call) until Mao Wei step in to clarify.

So anyway, here is the story which I send to IPer, hopefully Dave will post it when he wakes up (I mean literally!).

Hi Dave,

Just saw this news and find it funny because I just had dinner with Mao Wei and Prof. Qian last night (Mao is the Executive Director of CNNIC). To be exact, they have no idea of the news as they are in Perth right now. But after showing them the news and speaking to them, this is what I gathered.

The focus of the news is actually the launch of .MIL.CN, a new 2LD CNNIC is launching which requires a change in their Article. As a matter of procedure, they announced the revise Article that includes the the policy for the three Chinese TLD for .NET, .COM and .CN (网络，公司，中国). The Chinese TLDs was actually added 3 years ago in 2003. It is hardly news now.

It has been in operation for 3 years now as you can see from http://www.cnnic.net.cn/index/0B/index.htm

In practice, they did not actually use any alternative/parellel root. Instead, when someone registered a domain name like 联想.公司, what they get is 联想.公司.cn and the append of .cn is done automatically by the client resolution.

Dave, hope you can help to clarify this issue. The news is just .MIL.CN.

-James Seng

Like Ian Peter said: “There will be a few embarrassed editorials out there, but otherwise it’s business as usual.”

Sometimes it is better to ask first before pressing the panic button. I would seriously lmao if I see this on Washington Post or NYT tomorrow :-)