Gold rush or damp squib?

I return from an interesting trip to Vietnam where things seem to be moving along very quickly.

...and start my first post with a horrible mixed metaphor. Anyway, I was interested in this boston.com piece about plans in China for a local domain name system to compete with the US-based ICANN-managed .com, .cn, etc.

Official rationale: you can't type .com in Chinese.

Real reason: you can either think this is something very sinister relating to censorship or, equally possibly, it is one of a series of initiatives we are seeing in China to establish national standards that make the country less reliant on those set elsewhere. China has developed its own 3G standard and may feel it should do something similar for the Internet. The Ministry of Information Industry has been one of the more awkward for foreign companies to deal with for many years.

So, it's either Web 1.0 all over again with a rush to own domain names that you never use or it's all a bit irrelevant. The China-only domain names will probably not work many places outside the Chinese mainland as this would be an Internet within the Internet which would not interact smoothly with the ICANN-managed system. Of course, that may be the real rationale. It may, though, simply consign those domestic domains to permanent Second Division status which would make chasing after them and driving up prices look daft.