China Drops In Domain Registrations From #2 To #4

darthcamaro writes "A year ago, it looked like the .cn country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for China was growing so fast that it would displace .com. In 2010 that's no longer the case, as .cn has dropped from being the number two global domain by registrations to number four. And yes, .com is still number one. According to VeriSign, the top 10 list of TLDs in the first quarter was: .com, .de, .net, .cn, .uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu and .ru. So why did .cn decline? Spammers. 'Many of these are low-priced promotional names that have now come up for renewal at a higher price,' said Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign. 'The .cn registration decline was also based on the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) registry's implementation of the real names directive from the Chinese government primarily around verifiable "whois" data.'"

Re:.nl?

[Anonymous Coward]

extreme porn

Re:.nl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it does, our little country has one of the highest rates of internet usage. That is, not only connections, but active usage of it's facilities.

VeriSign misunderstands...

[Anonymous Coward]

The newly implement CNNIC policy no longer allows individuals to register .cn domains. To qualify, you must show your business license, business seal, and personal ID to the registrar. All existing domains can be audited retroactively. Some additional background can be found at http://lastwatchdog.com/china-noteworthy-steps-improve-cybersecurity/

Re:One thing China is doing right

[DaMattster]

I like my ability to be anonymous when I want. If spam is your problem, cutting down on it is pretty darned easy to the point where it is almost made redundant. I simply use OpenBSD's spamd solution which, within one week, rid me of nearly 100% of my spam without resource intensive filtering. I simply use the data gathered from UAlberta's trap list and run in a purely blacklisting environment. It took me all of half an hour to setup and saved me boat loads of aggravation. Plus spamd is an offensive solution rather the defensive. Any email coming from an IP that matches an entry in the traplist gets allowed to transmit at only 1 byte per second choking and potentially crashing the machine trying to do the sending with absolutely no effect on the recieving end. If the transmitter is brazen enough, it can wait the full 5 minutes just to transmit the first header. Some of the spam spewers tried multiple times, all meeting with the same fate. Within a week and half, I began to see less and less attempts at sending from the same IP address which could mean that my domain is being removed from databases. Even if you require truthful domain registration, it is very hard to fight a spammer through legel means! It is much easier and cheaper to use spamd and get some matter of satisfaction by parsing your logs and seeing how much of the spammer's time you have wasted. I still have my spamd box running after four years, I seldom get attemps so I get excited to see a new idiot.

Re:.net?

[maxwell demon]

Well, if it's not a commercial site, and you're not an organization, what's left?

• .us (or another country domain, if you are from another country)
• .name (if you want to use your real name)
• .info (you certainly plan to put some information there, right?)

Re:.nl?

[xaxa]

GB is the ISO country code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but UK was used instead (probably because Great Britain -- by itself -- doesn't include Northern Ireland, so we say UK when we mean the whole UK, and GB if we just mean the 'mainland').

There was meant to be a transition to .gb, but it never happened.