Interesting things happening in China. An article in the English edition of the People’s Daily on line is headlined: Decimal network security address begins operation:

“China’s decimal network security address was officially launched. China has made a fundamental breakthrough in its Internet development; and actual use has been successful. The birth of decimal network technology makes China the only country able to unify domain names, IP addresses and MAC addresses into the text of a metric system; the second, after the United States (US), in the world to have root servers and IP address hardware connectivity servers and its own domain name, IP address and MAC address resources; and enables our country to become the world’s second country (after the US) to possess and control scarce network resources such as network distribution, domain names and addresses. It puts a crack in the US’s monopoly over the Internet, based on hexadecimal technology; and is a major, independent technical innovation of the Internet in China.”

Someone asked whether this was a rumored IPv9?

I asked my arch econ list if anyone could help parse what was happening.

Brough Turner replied [also featured here on CircleID].

I asked some Chinese associates about this. The English article was based reports from a network security conference recently held at the Central Party School (in Beijing I believe). The Chinese press release shows up at multiple URLs, including here:

It appears IPv9 is a project name, not a new protocol. It lumps together several activities, including at least:

1. China will operate their own DNS root servers.
2. They will support purely decimal domain names, in addition to domain names in Kanji and in traditional “English” characters. Xie Jianping, head of the working group, demonstrated typing “12345? into a browser address bar and being taken directly to the China Central People’s Government portal.
3. There are also references to a “.china” root. I’m not sure if this is real or another way of talking about parts of their project.

Xie Jianping represents an MII (Ministry of Information Industries) working group headquartered in Shanghai. China’s new DNS root servers are being (will be?) deployed in Shanghai, Beijing and Changsha.

Cook’s Edge: Another very technically astute list member responded that he hoped Broughs evaluation was not accurate because if it were it would break a lot of things. Since at this point China has more internet users than almost another nation, they may well be getting ready to go their own way. We do indeed live in interesting times.