China's .cn Now the Second Most Popular TLD

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."

No surprise at all there...

[Zocalo]

... 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...

Hmm

[wmbetts]

I wonder what the ratio of phishing to legitimate sites is.

Cheap domain price plays a role as well.

[All_One_Mind]

While I'm sure that most of the growth is largely due to actual Chinese sites, it should be noted that anyone can buy .cn names, and some places offer them for as little as $1.99 for the first year. I should know because I purchased 350 of them this year to try and target various competitive terms in the search engines. In short, a lot of the money that webmasters spent on shitty .info names is now being spent on .cn names instead, and that shouldn't be overlooked.

Typosquatting it is...

[lothar97]

I am in-house counsel with a U.S. based company that has a large presence in China. We have a large number of domain names and trademarks in China (in English and in Chinese), and our brands are big on the Internet there. I review our domain name watch service reports, which monitors newly registered and renewed domain names worldwide- including .cn.

By far the largest amount of similar domain names I see in the report is .cn, and most of those are typosquatted domain names. If our trademark is WIDGET, then I see wodget.cn, widgit.cn, wiidget.cn, etc. A large number of the Internet users in China use pinyin (writing Chinese words with Latin characters) than Chinese character when online (e.g. writing "zhong guo" for China instead of the Chinese characters).

My hunch is that with so many people in China typing with letters which they may not be completely familiar (and where there may be different ways to transliterate from Chinese to pinyin), there is a large number of people who make mistakes when directly navigating to domain names. I do not see these typosquatted domains showing up in search engine results, but I do see a large number of them being renewed (and thus they are generating a large enough pay per click revenue to be reregistered.)

It gives me a lot more work to do to monitor these. We don't really file the .cn UDRP equivalent, because there are literally hundreds of these domain names out there. I thus suspect that the large number of .cn domain names are for typosquatted domains for known domains, and not for actual legitimate commercial/personal use.

Spammer's haven, too

[damn_registrars]

While people mentioned the phishing implications, the spamming importance of the .cn domain should not be overlooked either. I know I am not the only person who has seen a lot of spam on behalf of .cn domains, and I would say the WHOIS data is part of the reason why. For example, look at abcde.cn:

> whois abcde.cn
Domain Name: abcde.cn
ROID: 20030311s10001s00024435-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: æ±åÂÃ¥ÂååÂææéåÂÃ¥Â
Registrant Name: ÃÂæÂÂå¥
Administrative Email: [e-mail]
Sponsoring Registrar: Ã¥ÃÂÂæÂýÃÂÃÃÂææéåÂÃ¥Â
Name Server:ns1.dns.com.cn
Name Server:ns2.dns.com.cn
Registration Date: 2003-03-17 12:20
Expiration Date: 2010-03-17 12:48

Now how on earth does one contact the owner - or more importantly - the registrar of this domain? Even if you can make sense of the unicode, that is no guarantee that you'll find someone to talk to about this domain.

disclaimer I chose this domain at random, it may or may not be spamvertised or in any way evil.

In contrast, look at the same domain in a .com:

Registrant:
Yinan Wang
Apartment 127
51 Whitworth Street West
Manchester, Lancashire M15EA
United Kingdom

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc.
(http://www.godaddy.com)

So if you were someone looking to set up a spamvertised site to sell discount v!@gra, herbal supplements, knock-off watches, designer shoes, counterfeit handbags, and/or pirated software, which system would you choose for your domain registration information?

Is it possible to measure infinity?

[geekmux]

When you have people globally registering garbled crap names for domains in the almost infinite TLD namespace, what's the point in throwing statistics like this out there?

Besides, I really didn't know this was a race. Hell, if you want to see a TLD race to the top of the list, allow .xxx out there...