Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?

Mon Jul 4 10:26:11 UTC 2005

> That said, a big country implementing a new DNS root on a national scale 

> may not have that problem.  The telecom world is already full of systems 

> that don't cross national borders. In the US case, think of all the cell 

> phones that have international dialing turned off by default, and all 
the 
> 800 numbers whose owners probably aren't at all bothered by their 
> inability to receive calls from other countries.

The fact is that most Chinese people want to access the same
Internet resources as most Americans. Namely, those resources
that exist in their own country in their own language. So if
someone offers a root zone that contains everything in the 
ICANN zone plus additional zones that give access to resources
for a specific language group, i.e. Chinese-speakers, then 
it doesn't seem farfetched for all Chinese-speaking countries
to use that extended root zone. And it also does not seem farfetched
for American ISPs who market access services to the Chinese
speaking community in the USA to also use that extended root zone.

> A system that would limit my ability to talk to people in other 
countries 
> doesn't sound very appealing to me.

Every public root experiment that I have seen has always
operated as a superset of the ICANN root zone. In the past they
often have not had good ways to deal with TLD collision but
this may well have changed. Certainly, the xn-- TLDs seem
rather unlikely to collide with ICANN TLDs.

I think that the marketing people are going to win
this one. There is no marketable benefit to the ICANN
root zone but there are clear advantages for countries
using non-Latin alphabets to switch to a root zone that
allows for their own language to be used in domain names.
Turkey was recently mentioned and that is also a country
that uses a non-Latin alphabet.

--Michael Dillon