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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."
That'll be all the nice cheap phishing domains.
ok, I dind't bother to RTFA, so, any guesses of how many of these domains come from domain squatting/parking?
!sig
yes we cn.
Seeing as how .com is international?
... 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...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
è±èçZåoeæ#2åoeä'è"ç½'çsåsæç"é"åæçsèèï¼OEåoeæ±èäåZã
As well, English is now the #2 most widely used language on the Internet, behind Chinese.
I wonder what the ratio of phishing to legitimate sites is.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
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.
Forgive my ignorance, but is there such a thing as a Unicode TLD? Like instead of the Western characters "cn", is there something that's rendered in Chinese characters for a fully Chinese domain name?
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Chinese telecom infrastructure and investment may not be up to scale of US pre-dotcom bubble era, but this bubble is just another repeat waiting to happen.
Calling in "Re-Run", 'cause it's gonna be DY-NO-MITE!
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
It does have just two characters... nice....
I have never saw one guaranteeing a "substantial growth" of my TLD.
Although, comparing penis size, to TLD size, does seem somewhat appropriate.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Approximately one out of every two hundred people is schizophrenic. The parent post could quite possibly be from one of those people. It certainly does read like a diatribe written by someone in the throes of psychosis... specifically, Schizophrenia, Disorganized Type.
In which case, labeling them as a troll is somewhat cruel.
Thoughts?
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.
The explanation is simple, the investors are trying to buy all short .cn domain names up to 5 letters. Chinese ones.
> whois abcde.cn
Domain Name: abcde.cn
ROID: 20030311s10001s00024435-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: æ±åÂÃ¥ÂååÂææéåÂÃ¥Â
Registrant Name: ÃÂæÂÂå¥
Administrative Email: domain@abcde.cn
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.
.com:
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
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?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think it's some sort off cryptic message . Maybe a google translate to Chinese and back ?
Slipping shoelaces ?
Markov chain text generator. http://www.doctornerve.org/nerve/pages/interact/mrkvform.shtml
Makes for interesting reading... even if it is Verisign's! I would have thought China would take a more proactive role in monitoring its domain names, especially being such a closed and censored country.
I've had to register some pretty interesting domains in the past; some country level registrars will make you jump through exorbitant amount of hoops before processing your application while others will simply refuse unless you can prove physical residency.
It does make you wonder whether China has fallen into this trap accidentally, or if they have been enjoying the revenue a little too much?
Once upon a time the Dutch had a unique connection to the -then- internet, we were the first outside of the USofA.
This was at a time the USSR and China were still very People-minded and refused to even think of such connections.
Maybe the subject of today has something to do with the size of the population ?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Need to choose words more carefully, editor. Just because something is common, doesn't mean it's popular (which implies something is liked, admired.)
Spam and phishing is very common, but it's not popular. And it frequently comes from .cn domains.
In english "Popular" can imply being "well liked" or "favored". I think that most /. readers are probably upset at the notion that .cn is well liked or favored for any other reason than being a cheap haven for phishing, spam and un-registered domain names.
There's a scam going on where Chinese registrars email .COM domain owners and claim that a "big company" requested to register the .CN version of the domain. So "as a courtesy" the contact the .com owner to let them know "their trademark could be at risk" and they can register the .CN with them.
It's a fairly legit sounding scam until you do a little research on the net and find SO many similar stories.
Paypal of course reminds everyone of "X" (X [x.com]) Makes you seriously wonder if it's legit doesn't it?
I type x.com into English Wikipedia and it gives me PayPal. It turns out that X.com Corp., an online bank, bought PayPal's then-parent company after about half a year of operation. The combined company ended up dropping the "X.com" brand in favor of "PayPal" when marketing discovered potential pr0nographic connotations of "X.com".
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...
China is the #2 source of spam and crap, after .RU (Russia) domain. Higher even than Slovenia.
For all the complaints about the Great Firewall of China, I believe we need a Great Firewall FROM China. I call for blocking most if not all unauthenticated traffic from .CN
If they don't like it, so sorry.
"In case you needed further proof of China's breakneck pace of growth on the web" .cns for $2.99 -- the cheapest of any TLDs -- for a year.
Yeah, and this has nothing to do with the fact that most registrars were selling
if there were actual private ownership therein. Hell, they can come up with all-sorts-of-random-crap.cn and wow, they're wickedly huge now.
What, because both TLDs and your penis size aren't physical entities, just some abstract thing that people pretend are real?
As far as I am concerned, these domains might as well not exist. I can't read Chinese.
But your children or grandchildren are likely to be able to. Like it or not, China is already one of the major players and will continue to grow in influence. Chinese will continue to become increasingly relevant to everybody; after all, there are more Chinese than any other single cultural group, and the advantage of speaking Chinese is already significant, not least in research. They are already very close to the top when it comes to mathematical research, and I doubt they produce all of that in English.
I don't think it is bad, really. English is just a language, and a language is only a tool.
I thought China was .zh ?