China looks to Internet future

BEIJING, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- China says it is moving to the next generation of the Internet for advanced security, privacy options and, more importantly, many more IP addresses.

IPv6, or Internet Protocol version 6, will offer China's Internet users -- almost twice the number as in the United States -- many more IP addresses, whose supply on the current Internet is nearly used up, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

"China must move to IPv6," Wu Jianping, director of the Chinese Educational and Research Network, said. "In the United States some people don't believe it's urgent, but we believe it's urgent."

China, already the world's dominant manufacturer of computers and consumer electronics products with its ready supply of low-cost labor, has an exploding economy and increasing technological infrastructure that could put it at the forefront of the next generation of computing, experts said.

This is in spite of the fact China does not tend to create forward-thinking individual entrepreneurs in the mold of a Steve Jobs, they said.

"There are different kinds of innovation," said Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute. "We tend to equate innovation with companies that start from garages based on brainstorms.

"There is another kind of innovation that results in constant improvement that we are not good at -- and they are."