The Impact of the New gTLD Program on the Internet Governance Regimes of Emerging Economies - China's Domain Name Regulation Revolution

Abstract

The diverse community of hosts, users, and networks relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to locate Internet services and devices worldwide. This system performs the function of mapping user friendly host names to machine readable Internet Protocol (IP) addresses which are used by computers to identify each other and thereby make data transfers possible. According to the distributed structure of the name space, the DNS is administrated hierarchically by multi-organizations with each administrator exercising control over lower level domains. To be specific, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private non-profit organization contracted with the US government, is operating the top of the DNS hierarchy — the root zone. According to the contract, ICANN is authorized to develop policies for regulating the root zone and tracking Top Level Domains (TLD), the subordinate level of name space beneath the root in hierarchy. Likewise, the administrator of TLD is charged with responsibility for developing policies for second level domain name allocation and maintaining domain name services.