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.'"

.com central role in the future?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article has this quote:
".com has been a platform for Internet innovation over the past 25 years, and we expect .com will continue to play a central role for the innovators, entrepreneurs and companies who will shape the Internet over the next 25 years"

Interesting comment, since it has become virtually impossible to register any catchy names these days. Try imagining a name for a company or service. Make up somethng random. Chances are, it will not be available.
Sure .com will continue to play an important role, but with the level of cybersquatting I think that innovators and entrepreneurs will soon be using other TLD's.

Re:That doesn't mean anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Is not supported by the data in the summary. While the .cn domain is for China, there is no restriction against people from any country registering in .com.

Right... but the China domains are the ones ending in .cn. The .com ones aren't tied to any particular country. So there is a drop in China domain registrations. Understand?

I suppose if the story said there was a drop in Ameircan tax revenues you'd object that not only Americans pay US taxes and that US taxes aren't the only ones paid by Americans?

Re:One thing China is doing right

[djluo]

The majority reason why Chinese gov. doing this is just want to make sure those websites won't contain any bad things.

If you do have bad things on your website........then gov. gotcha