China has nearly 100 million Internet users, so it’s only natural that the country want a stake in how the Internet is managed. Chinese Ambassador Sha Zukang recently said that China opposes the “monopolization” of the Internet by one state, a reference to the Untied States, which ultimately controls the digital medium.
I think the world is much better off without the Chinese government controlling the Internet, but the government does have one valid point — the Internet still does a fairly poor job of supporting the Chinese language. The domain name system currently only supports Latin characters. There are a few workarounds available, but these aren’t long-term solutions. Ultimately, Unicode will provide the necessary language support, but this too is going to take awhile to be fully implemented.
This will be an interesting story to follow in the years ahead…
