What if you built an Internet and no one came?

This was the question that went through my mind when I saw a couple of stories this week about China's certification of a "next-generation" IPv6-based Internet. This included a typically breathless Xinhua story which proclaimed that "China leads next-generation Internet development".

Well, maybe. Any student of the Internet knows that it has room for improvement, especially in security and addressing. IPv6 has been in development for over 10 years, and is meant to be the successor to the current IPv4 version of the Internet Protocol. It addresses one of IPv4's key weaknesses, which is that it can only support a relatively limited number of fixed IP addresses. That's limited in terms of the number of devices on today's Internet, mind you; as a bank balance it would still look pretty good. Once upon a time, when the Internet was limited to a few academic and defense installations, it probably seemed limitless. Today, when every dog has an Internet-enabled dog dish, it seems a little bit more confining.

IPv6 has, in fact, been in use for a while, but is still not widely adopted. It's one of those technologies that has always seemed to be "just a couple of years away", despite appearing pretty useful. The reality is that, as often happens, various kludges and cheats have nicely extended the life of IPv4 at a lot less hassle than widespread adoption of a new protocol would require.

So what does this have to do with China?

Good question. China's exploration of IPv6 is much less about the immediate usefulness of the technology, or the breathless performance claims (few of which would withstand real-world use), than it is about planting a Chinese flag on the future of the Internet. The Xinhua article actually makes that clear if you read through to the end, where it proclaims:

In developing the [China Next Generation Internet], China built the world's first IPv6-onlynetwork, and for the first time used domestic IPv6 routers, the core Internet components, in its national backbone network.

Experts called it a progress with strategic significance by ending reliance on foreign technologies in Internet construction.

***

Recognized as the future direction of the Internet development and a weapon in keeping with economic, political and military advantages, the next generation Internet has been a strategic task for major developed countries like Japan and the United States.

China has written the development of the next generation Internet into its national economic and social development plan for the 2006-2010 period, and made it a key project in building an information-based country.

One of the major industrial sore spots in China is the lack of domestically produced intellectual property, and the royalties that Chinese manufacturers have to pay to foreign patent holders to build devices such as DVD players, mobile phones and Wi-Fi-capable computers. Thus, China is working on domestic standards for high-capacity optical disks (EV-D), 3G mobile phone networks (TD-SCDMA) and wireless networking (WAPI). This has been the fodder for some spectacular tussles with foreign companies. China knows the next generation of the Internet will also be important, and it really wants to have a piece of the action.

But will it get one? Well, that remains to be seen. It's one thing to build a technology, and it's another thing to get the world to show up for it. Just ask Sony, which watched Betamax lose out to inferior VHS and is currently fighting to avoid repeating history with the Blu-ray disk.

One problem, aside from R&D capabilities, is that China has not managed to master the politics of the international standards process. This has lead to some diplomatic rows that haven't done wonders for international enthusiasm toward China's domestic standards. Most recently, this happened when the IEEE endorsed an upgraded version of Wi-Fi over WAPI last March, which lead to unseemly (although oddly believable) allegations of conspiracy.

One solution for problems with foreign technologies is to mandate domestic ones by fiat. That doesn't do much for your international markets, and it can get you into World Trade Organization (WTO) trouble, but it has still been tried, most famously with WAPI. Might China mandate that its onshore Internet simply be switched over to new technologies developed by domestic manufacturers? Maybe, but it could expect some major legal hassles from everyone, from the telcos and ISPs to the manufacturers of network cards.

So the Chinese might have reason to be proud of the technology in its new network (it's hard to say until others can play with it). And it may be that some of that technology finds its way into the global Internet of Tomorrow. But if it doesn't play its diplomatic and commercial cards right, it might just end up one more academic curiosity, while the real world continues streaming along happily, if imperfectly, by on good ol' IPv4.

Chinese Internet note: Ask any group of apparently informed sources how many bloggers China has, and you'll get as many answers as people you talk to. However, the China Network Information Center (CNNIC) has just released its own guess. It's saying China has 17 million bloggers, of whom 7.7 million actually update their blogs regularly. 34 million people have registered for blogs, but most of those blogs are idle. There are 54.7 million active readers of blogs. Or, as The Register waggishly pointed out, about four per blog.

Of course, it may be a moot point, since chat rooms are considerably more influential in China than blogs are.