As the birthplace of the Internet, the United States created the infrastructure of almost all existing networks, including technical standards, applications standards and service protocols. This gives it massive influence over infrastructure – of the 13 root servers in the world, 10 are in America. And it is also the only country to have signed agreements with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

While ICANN was created under the auspices of a certain historical background, within the framework of international law its authority is limited. As a nongovernmental organization, it operates only under a memorandum of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Moreover, this memorandum has been frequently modified and it is the U.S. Department of Commerce who makes direct decisions on important issues. ICANN is responsible for the management of top-level domain names and the assignment of global IP addresses. Every sovereign state now has a strategic interest in the allocation of new IPv6 addresses, and decision-making authority would more appropriately rest with the United Nations.

The United States holds absolute power over national top-level domain names, which could pose a potential threat to the sovereignty of any state. To take a single example: one morning, when you get up, you might suddenly find no websites with Iraq or some such country as the top-level domain name. No negotiations would be required with anybody, nor any open, transparent or democratic process, since the United States possesses total control over root servers, global Internet addresses and domain names. Any sovereign state might be justifiably worried about such a situation. I therefore believe that the management of ICANN should be modified.

The Internet's role is to be a center of cooperation and communication. No person, community or state can be self-centered, even as strong and powerful a state as the U.S. Most issues cannot be solved within the framework of the U.S. alone -- for example protecting Internet data and systems from computer hackers, viruses and other threats, defending the privacy of Internet users, and protecting children and other vulnerable people from online pornography, violence and other offensive content.

The Internet has operated in China through a decade that has witnessed the rapid development of Chinese society. Reform and opening up has paved the way for China's progress, while the spread in popularity of the Internet, also an element of China's reform and opening-up, has promoted the development of Chinese society.

According to a report from CNNIC in July 2008, by the end of June 2008 the number of Chinese Internet users had reached 253 million, making the country the world's leader in Internet users. The number of Chinese websites has grown continually to 1.92 million, among which over 1.37 million have "CN" as the top-level domain name, forming 71 percent of the total. This means that most of the country's websites use the domain name CN, and China's national domain name leads the world in registrations. This is an important issue when we come to the question of ensuring the security of our national domain name.

Internet applications in China cover all aspects of society, from critical elements of national infrastructure such as electronic government, financial systems, air transport and defense security, to people's daily life including education, medicare, shopping and entertainment. The defining principles of worldwide network governance, namely openness, security, diversity and access, are problematic from the point of view of the application and management of Chinese networks.

As we know, the Internet played an important role in China's successful hosting of the Beijing Olympic Games, but the Olympic ticketing system crashed on the first day it opened. The ticketing system, designed by an overseas company, had the capacity to accommodate 2 million users simultaneously, but at the moment when the system opened it received 8 million hits. This suggests that it is of great importance to integrate the general principles of the network technology with solutions that are specific to the Chinese situation.

The expanded scale of the Internet also increases security threats. According to Kingsoft's Report on China's Computer Virus Epidemic and Internet Security in the First Half of 2008, computer viruses and Trojans have undergone an explosive growth in the first half of this year. By June 30, Kingsoft had intercepted over 1.24 million new computer viruses and Trojans. This represents an increase of 338 percent compared with the total number in 2007, and is greater than the total number of viruses identified in the last five years. Since August this year, the amount of spam has also increased by 67 percent. All these figures highlight the problem of security lurking in such fields as e-mail, online shopping and bank payments. Also, issues of intellectual property rights in the fields of network music, video and games will become more and more prominent.