The Domain Name Crackdown Begins in China!

Two thousand and nine will not be remembered as the year Chinese censors decided to lighten up. This week, the Chinese agency that oversees the country’s Internet domain name registry announced it will limit the system to use by businesses, effectively excluding private citizens from registering new domains.

According to a statement on The China Internet Network Information Centre, as of this week, the only people who can register new domains will be businessmen or organizations, and all those new registrants will need to have both written application materials as well as copies of their enterprise’s business license or organization code certificate.

The new rules, which the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) put into place on Dec. 14, are meant to restrict online pornography. But some new media experts say they may add another tool to the country’s array of Internet controls. “Many believe that the crackdown on porn was just an excuse,” says Isaac Mao, a Chinese blogger and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The real reason has to do with the various goals of internet censorship, one of which is to curb the individual’s voice.”

Web censorship in China is rarely an all or nothing endeavor. When a site begins to carry too many materials or too much commentary that the authorities find objectionable, it will get blocked if based overseas, and highly restricted or possibly closed if it’s based in China. Web users move on to new haunts, or find new routes to old ones. But by plugging enough holes and muffling enough dissenting voices, China’s Communist Party curbs online opposition to its rule while still allowing the Internet to be open enough to not dangerously impede commerce.

This week’s move by CNNIC to limit registrations to licensed businesses will affect domains ending in .cn. There are now nearly 13 million .cn domain names, about 80% of the total web sites registered in China. The policy came after state broadcaster China Central Television, which has targeted search engines such as Google and China’s Baidu.com in several reports this year about the prevalence of online porn, turned its attention to what it described as CNNIC’s lax standards for regulating Chinese domains. The .cn domain is a leading source of online fraud, according to the TK-based Internet security firm McAfee, and the heightened requirements for registration could help to ease that problem.

Only time will tell if this is able to help with the amount of websites active with the .cn domain that are used to hand out malware and other things such as pornography. Or if this new policy will be modified at all to help they many people who have legit websites running with a .cn domain.