Chinese Domain Name Registrations Break New Record

[mulligan]

Chinese Domain Name Registrations Break New Record

January 23, 2007

China Internet Network Information Center says that by the end of December 2006, China has had 1.8 million .CN domain names, ranking fourth in the world for top-level country domain names.

Mao Wei, director of CNNIC, says that the increase of .CN domain name registrations has upgraded China's position in the Internet world while improving the country's national security. As a result of large scale registrations, the price of .CN domain names remain cheaper than that of .com within China. Mao says the price of .CN will remain lower than that of .com for a long time.

CNNIC's statistics show that in the past year, China's .CN domain name registrations increased from 1.09 million to 1.8 million, increasing by as much as 65.1% and the increase in December even doubled that of the same period of the previous year. The report says that the outstanding stability and security is the main appeal for Internet users to choose .CN instead of .com.

Shame it doesnt mention how many are IDNs though I would hazard a guess IDN.cn are responsible for a large number of them

[touchring]

Not sure about .cn, but .com, if you refer to those recently registered lists, seems to me that 60-80% of all idns registered are chinese names, the majority are non-generics. Surprisingly, latins are low.

[mulligan]

The bit I dont get is ".....while improving the country's national security..."

[touchring]

The dot com is under American control, it is in the best interest of the Chinese government to encourage their citizens to use .cn. These people think ahead.

[Drewbert]

IDN was sitting around 25% in October 2006, based on a ballpark figure from a CNNIC rep (via 3rd party).

I suspect it's gone up since then. It would be very interesting to hear the current level.

[Rubber Duck]

Interestingly they charge about 6 times as much for IDN.cn as ASCII.cn