China's .cn Now the Second Most Popular TLD 86
darthcamaro writes "In case you needed further proof of China's breakneck pace of growth on the web, InternetNews is reporting on data from Verisign that the .cn Top Level Domain (TLD) has now become the second biggest TLD worldwide, surpassing Germany's .de and second only to .com. The number of .cn sites grew by 76 percent in 2008, which is significantly more growth than .com and .net, which only grew by 16 percent combined. A graph in the Verisign report (PDF) shows how quickly China's internet presence has grown in the past two years."
So the biggest ccTLD then? (Score:4, Informative)
Seeing as how .com is international?
Re:What about Unicode? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains [wikipedia.org]
Scroll to the bottom, in the IDNA TLD group... or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDNA [wikipedia.org]
Re:No surprise at all there... (Score:3, Informative)
... given the volume of clearly throw away domains in ".cn" consisting of five or six random letters for domain and subdomain being used to spam replica jewelry, pills and porn I've been seeing for the last few months. It might well be the world's second most popular .TLD, but it's also quite probably the world's biggest virtual sewer as well.
I wonder where it would rank if countries saw their ccTLDs in a similar vein to the more tangible aspects of their country like cities, natural features and the like. I'm pretty sure we'd see a little more care being taken to prevent such obvious abuses of ccTLD registration processes for a start...
But how can you tell if the yrtdvdvhwg.cn is a random phishing site, or an ASCI representation of Chinese characters? I am sure that the .cn domain is heavily represented by both.