As a young boy, I enjoyed playing the former.  Its an excellent family game of tactics and observation.  When it comes to the Internet, the latter is also full of tactics and observation but to many it looks like anything BUT a harmless game!   I wonder.

When on 1^st March, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) unilaterally created three top-level domains (.cn, .com and .net) using Chinese characters, like many others I thought this was just another play in China’s attempt to isolate its people from the truth and reality that the internet affords.   Everyone started speculating that this was China’s attempt to break free from the US created and hosted  Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). 

"It means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of ICANN of the U.S.",  reported the People's Daily Online, a Chinese government-approved publication.  

So, what’s at stake here?   Some Internet experts are concerned that this move will see China administrating its top-level domains with its own separate root servers, which could cause a “split in the Internet”.    "Fragmentation is a concern both to ICANN and us because of end-user confusion," said Geir Rasmussen, chief executive of Global Name Registry, a domain name registration organisation that oversees the .name domain.

It seems to me that the Chinese may simply have recognised at a national level that not every IP network wants (or needs) to be ‘part of the internet’, all of the time.   Geir Rasmussen goes on, "Users might lose trust in the system if there are multiple versions of the same domains. If someone launched a name in a different root, you as an end user could not be sure which root you were using. It would be like having a phone number that points to two different people".

Wrong!  Launching a name in a different root is a different name!  There are lots of PABX phone networks configured for internal private communication as well as global public communication via connection to the PSTN.  It may look and feel seamless to the user, but the reality is that they are different and separate networks.  Why does every IP-based network that uses conventional IP nomenclatures and conventions have to be entirely open to the rest of the world’s Internet all the time?  Why should not China choose to create a Chinese-cyberspace open only to those within that country?

I’ll tell you why.  Any State to take that decision on behalf of individual citizens is a denial of freedom unless it has a democratic legitimacy that means that such a decision really is the will of the people.  I am not sure that is the case in China.

So my question to the Chinese Government is this!   “You have decided to do something which, in principle, I have no problem with.  But suppose a group of your citizens want to take hold of this very same concept which you are implementing at a national level and implement it in the context their village or community by creating an OPLAN – would you welcome that?”  

I suspect that is where we might part company – so well done Government of China for demonstrating an important principle relating to how we can deploy these wondrous digital technologies how we want to create and conserve ‘local privacy, intimacy and security’. But you could try harder by driving these important ideas and  principles down to the local level so that communities, villages and towns can begin to develop OPLANs to serve their own needs – using them to connect to the global internet (as permitted by you, the Government of course!) but also using the OPLAN for lots, lots more - that has  nothing to do with anyone outside that village or community – let alone the State!