Contacts

Annotation

Dr. Prof. Hong Xue, Professor, Beijing Normal University, Director of the Institute for the Internet Policy & Law

China v. ICANN and others: Conflicts of Governance on IDNs

When ICANN is finally going to lift the curtain on IDNs after more than a decade’s developments, debates and desires, Chinese domain name industry is undergoing the coldest winter. The coldness conveyed from one of the gigantic BRIC countries has been felt in the other part of the world. But it is far from the end of the story. A saga of conflict of governance just started. With the progressive launch of the native-script TLDs, ICANN will no longer be able to shield in mask of limited technical coordination and have to face the tough public policy issues and the concurrent territorial governance regimes. Different from the ASCII-script TLDs over which ICANN acquired the global authority by default, many countries have had full-fledged laws or regulations on the correspondent native-script TLDs. Shall ICANN honor these existing proclamations by the sovereign governments? It seems that ICANN has come to the crossroads. IDNs will be testing whether the global domain name system could be able to reconcile or clash with the territorial governance; whether ICANN’s so-called multi-stakeholder regime could be able to handle with the sovereign states; and, whether the virtual “clash of civilizations” would lead to a bright or dim future.

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