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A Brief account of .cn Registrations in China

News 07-08-2012

EVOLUTION OF .CN REGISTRATIONS




BACKGROUND

2007
In response to the market demand in the emerging Chinese Internet Community, Registry initiates promotional program “1 RMB Experience”.  Due to the lower price, the registration volume of .cn sharply increased to 13 million by the end of 2008, which was the top count among all the ccTLDs at the time.

After this .cn boom, it was found that the domain name abuse had also increased considerably along with the domain name registration, especially in terms of illegal content, Spam and inaccurate WHOIS records.   In order to keep the consumer trust, the Registry suspended the “1 RMB Experience” program in 2009.  The registrations subsequently fell.

2009
“Target Abusive Domain Name Program” launched. Registry outlines 3 steps to fight domain name abuse;
  • Cooperation with Abusive Information Complaint Center of China Internet Society to shut down the website and cancel the illicit domain name registration when receiving validated complaint.
  • CNNIC conducts strict Whois Accuracy review of existing domain name and require the domain name registrant to submit Photo ID for validation of the whois data. Failure to provide such proof, results in the domain name registration being canceled.  
  • For new domain name applications, the Registry starts conducting strict registrant information validation before activation of  the domain name. Also incorporate requirements for every new applicant to submit proof of establishment of the registration entity (Corporate registration ID, etc.) to validate the information. 

The result of these steps has been very effective with the percentage of domain name abuse dropping sharply which in turn helped .cn  to became a trusted TLD. However, during the process, the Registry lost much of its registrations (which were mainly the illicit domain name registrations). So the count dropped to less than 4,000,000

.CN TODAY

Thanks to the improved brand image as a secure and reliable TLD, the registrations have been gradually rising since 2011. This was helped also by the fact that rather than having to produce corporate ID's as validation, individuals can register domains using only personal IDs for validation.  This change was made possible given the improvements to mechanisms monitoring domain name abuse and tracking. 
The registrations count of .cn has been quickly recovering since then and on the rise. 

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