"Internet autonomy" = we want to have our own intranet so we can cut off the rest of the world from our population without causing technical trouble.
"Unilateral action" = we're gonna do this whether you like it or not.
But you know what, the Chinese already have the means to do this. Just block anything that doesn't end in ".cn", and block port 53 on all foreign DNS servers. Then what's the point of this internet draft? Just something that somebody can cite later to lend an appearance of support when China does break away from the internet?
We probably should have foreseen this and fixed our system earlier. I remember being at Interop back before it was cool, think industry at Gopher not Mosaic (more 'People Sometimes Need Data Processing', and not so much of the 'All'). Anyway, even then I was flabbergasted at the way networking was being implemented. The truth is, there ARE really good reasons to have a multiple DNS roots. We probably SHOULD have thought about languages with non latin alphabets. It is also true that we SHOULD have considered allocating more internet addresses to China than we allocated to, say, Stanford University. And, yes, the list goes on and on.
Having mentioned all that, I am inclined to try to fix the internet we currently use. And, to be fair, even the Chinese will concede that we have been TRYING to do just that. These things take time though. No one, (and by no one I mean Governments), really has the motivation to be very proactive in the attempts to fix a lot of these issues. This is just one manifestation of the diverging interests.
> we SHOULD have considered allocating more internet addresses to China than we allocated to, say, Stanford University.
That might actually have been a good justification for China being in control of its own addressing scheme (which the draft proposes) if we didn't have IPv6. But now there is no need, since the cost of implementing a nationwide NAT (sort of) might rival, if not exceed, the cost of transitioning to IPv6.
Don't confuse IP addresses (which are finite and especially in the early days could only be handed out it big chunks) with DNS names (which are infinite and as hierarchical and granular as necessary).
If they block all but .cn they are effectively shutting down the internet. Of the top 25 sites in China, 22 use .com - and 21 of those are Chinese companies[1]. Those companies would much rather have their domain in US Jurisdiction than subject to the whims of the PRC.
"Unilateral action" = we're gonna do this whether you like it or not.
But you know what, the Chinese already have the means to do this. Just block anything that doesn't end in ".cn", and block port 53 on all foreign DNS servers. Then what's the point of this internet draft? Just something that somebody can cite later to lend an appearance of support when China does break away from the internet?