STUDY: Tougher CN Restrictions = .CN Decline & .COM Rise

[NameYourself]

China's government-linked domain name registry agency confirmed today that registration of Chinese domain names is on the decline. The news comes amid efforts by the registry agency to make it more difficult to set up domains unless they are a business. This has turned people off of .cn, and encouraged them to register under .com instead.

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released statistics today showing the number of .cn registrations had dropped to 11.21 million. This is a drop from 80% to 64.7% of all domestically registered domain names. At the same time, .com registrations increased from 16.6% to 29.6%.

complete article... (http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225900055&subSection=All+Stories)

[Rubber Duck]

Why not go to the horse's mouth and get the actual facts?

http://cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2003/12/13/2020.htm

CNNIC says only 7,246,686 way down on the peak of 14,082,553 in Feb 2009!

China's government-linked domain name registry agency confirmed today that registration of Chinese domain names is on the decline. The news comes amid efforts by the registry agency to make it more difficult to set up domains unless they are a business. This has turned people off of .cn, and encouraged them to register under .com instead.

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released statistics today showing the number of .cn registrations had dropped to 11.21 million. This is a drop from 80% to 64.7% of all domestically registered domain names. At the same time, .com registrations increased from 16.6% to 29.6%.

complete article... (http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225900055&subSection=All+Stories)

[NameYourself]

A trend is a trend is a trend, this was a published article just 2 days old, but according to your facts direct from cnnic, the weaning away from cn is even more extreme than published.. the big picture here is unmistakable.

[Wot]

I think you will find that the "trend" is ascii.cn that were being sold for about 1 yuan with a view to establishing .cn, .info went the same way and currently .in, but nowhere near the damage that was done to .cn - obviously this was going to blow up in CNNIC's faces and did with a mighty bang with .cn being used for phishing etc.

This is the main reason that CNNIC set about cleaning up the act by introducing tougher restrictions and actually applying the regulations. These regs were tightened and there is now a leaner cleaner .cn/.中国 emerging.

I don't see the authorities in China actually saying that only .cn must be used internally but there is certainly likely to be some pressure as IDN becomes mainstream.