The announcement proves that China has solved problems with Chinese-script domains that it had experienced with the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), earlier this year.
In May, Liu had expressed disappointment in China’s lack of Top Level Domain (TLD) accessibility, and had mentioned plans to join up with other nations in the region to remedy the scenario: ‘The multi-language TLD system is important for us and other Asian countries to further improve the penetration of the Internet. We will work with Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea to suggest ICANN enables a TLD system in our own languages.’ Of ICANN’s role in the situation, he had said: ‘[Its] process in reviewing and evaluating this proposal is slow and sluggish.’
Now, however, Liu – buoyed by Microsoft’s backing – has a different take on China’s online prospects: ‘The co-operation will bring material changes to the Chinese-character .cn domains. We expect that registration of domains will increase rapidly after the co-operation with Microsoft.’
Liu’s colleague, Mao Wei, said that over 150 million Internet users were adept with the Chinese language.
On 17 November, Liu Zhijiang, a director with the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) revealed that the organisation has co-operated with Microsoft to ensure that the software giant’s new IE7 Internet browser will support Chinese-character ‘.cn’ domain names
