FBI Director James Comey said Tuesday he has seen some improvement in cooperation from China in fighting cybercrime following last year's bilateral agreement on the issue.

Various news outlets alleged that new Internet regulations might cut China off from the global Internet, and that foreign websites might have to re-register within China in order to maintain access to its market. Few of these comments, however, evince an understanding of how the domain name system (DNS) works, and how these regulations might impact online traffic.

Sino-U.S. relations in cyberspace in 2016 will be defined by three key policies: attribution, sanctions, and norms. Franz-Stefan Gady discusses what each policy could look like, and also the reviews the cyber diplomacy between the two countries in 2015.

China’s position on Internet governance is that the Internet is a mere reflection of physical space, and therefore should be subject to similar norms of non-external interference. After the Wuzhen Conference, the question on how to engage with China in the realm of cyberspace remains largely unanswered.

China used the World Internet Conference to promote its vision of Internet governance to an international audience and to defend the concept of cyber sovereignty. China will continue to push for multilateral internet governance, rather than multi-stakeholder internet governance, which can include private companies and other groups.

As big powers, China and the United States need to show restraint in cyberspace. The announcements by Apple Pay to partner with China UnionPay and by Microsoft to work with Chinese researchers to develop the Windows 10 operating system are but two instances of growing Sino-US cooperation in the cyber sphere.

Both countries should promise not to carry out attacks on financial institutions and entities that underpin the global economy, share information on third-party threats to the financial sector, encourage and incentivize the banking industry to make the strictest rules for ensuring information safety, and strengthen resilience against various forms of cyber attacks.

U.S. and Chinese officials on Tuesday kicked off talks aimed at improving cooperation on commercial cyber espionage investigations. In the first official cybersecurity dialogue between the two countries since early 2014, Beijing representatives joined the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments, and FBI and intelligence community officials, to discuss the logistics of responding to reports of commercial espionage.

It may be too premature to argue that the China-U.S. cyber-agreement has failed. The vagueness of the agreement needs to be followed up with specific cooperation, like a cooperative agreement between both nations’ Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), which are the first (and last line) of defense in protecting a country’s critical information infrastructure from cyberattacks.

Google Inc is quietly putting back its services in China, amid speculation that the United States online search provider is preparing a return to the world's biggest Internet market.