Chinese Domain Registration regulations relaxed.

quicker registration but ownership rules still rigid.

[Woz]

In an article [www1.chinadaily.com.cn] from the China Daily, the Ministry of Information Technology will ease its rules at the end of next month.

"After September 30, qualified applicants will have domain names approved within six hours of their online registration. Presently,the process takes up to five days."

So the number of Chinese Domains will be increasing. However, there is no indication as to whether ownership rules will also be relaxed. A very interesting tit-bit of information from the article is that there are currently around 126,000 Chinese domains registered, but it is estimated that there are "about 700,000 domain names in China with the .com or .net suffix."

Interesting Reading.

Onya
Woz

[bill]

That would have been good news back when I was picking domain names [webmasterworld.com] for my Chinese site ;)

The article talks about speeding up the .cn registration process and possibly lowering the fees involved, but it didn't say anything about simplifying the process or whether online payment would be an option. I ended up going with a pinyin .com rather than a .cn due to payment difficulties and unclear DNS maintenance utilities (among others). This will be good to keep an eye on...Kind of reminds me of the opening of the Japanese .jp domains not long ago.

[Woz]

I think, reading between the lines, they are simply speeding up the registration process and not relaxing the ownership requirements such as local presence. If they were to remove such restrictions all at once I think they would find themselves overwhelmed with an avalanch of registrations from the world over. I was again reading the other day somewhere, can't find it now, about China very large online population so I am sure there are a good many people waiting in the wings in the hope that the doors to an open registration systems for Chinese Domains will be announced. Can't see it happening myself.

However it is a good step in the right direction.

On a side note, the upcoming Beijing Olympics are proving a major catalyst to the ongoing developement of China in general. I wonder whether this was an un-acknowledged factor in this decision.

Onya
Woz

[bill]

I also found it interesting that there is no mention at all of the native language domain name system anymore...but that's talk for another thread [webmasterworld.com]...;)