So, you want a Chinese domain name?

CS // 15 Jul 2011 // Comments Off on So, you want a Chinese domain name?

China wanted control over the internet, and now they have it.

2 years ago, China was a spammer haven, as domain registration was cheap, and USA based spammers (which still is the source of 99% of spam) registered a gazillion odd spam domains.

The powers that be decided to change that.

They changed the law.

First it only affected new domain registrations, you needed to provide real info for those registrations. Once they had that down, then they extended that to only Chinese people or Chinese organizations could register chinese domains. Then they started enforcing ICP registration for domains – each domain in china requires an ICP licence, or it can’t be hosted. For bonus annoyance points to do a ICP registration the website must be shutdown till the licence gets issued.

Then they extended that to no ICP licence, no domain – if your domain doesn’t have an ICP licence, bam, its put in suspended state at the registrar.
Now they’re rigorously enforcing ICP registrations to the n’th degree.

They’ve been cancelling those left right and center for no real reason, forcing people to resubmit.

Currently an ICP submission requires that you have an ISP licence, as only ISP’s can submit ICP’s for their hosted domains.

Each ISP has to verify sites as follows. Have the owner or representative for the site provide fill in 3 forms, make certified copies of business licence, copy of their ID, and take a photo of them in the ISP’s office. Which is the reason why all our clients need to come to our office now for photo’s and bring documents for their registrations.

These are scanned and submitted to the local Telecom authority through the ICP backend registration system. The user is then assigned a login and password where they can check their ICP licence at the MII official website.

Its been a pain in the ass for us recently as the Telco has been arbitrarily cancelling perfectly good ICP licences without notice or reason.
The Telecom bureau for each region does publish blacklists, but guess what – the cancelled ones don’t appear the blacklist.

If you host a domain with a cancelled licence (which unless you literally check all your clients licence stuff daily, you have no way of knowing about currently), then the Telco will also do fun lets call you at 6:30 on a Friday evening, and tell you that you have 30 minutes to remove that domain, or they shut down that ip address (shutting off hundreds of clients). What fun.

Its gotten to the point that I’m seriously considering moving all my non .cn clients to a new oversea’s server because we can’t keep up with their ever changing needs.

They keep changing the rules and regulations, they don’t have a decent mechanism in place for tracking stuff, and there is no warning if they arbitrarily cancel a licence.

What its meant for us is that domain management has gotten dramatically more time intensive over the last year, as the regulations and requirements for paperwork have changed a number of times now, requiring resubmissions, constant checks, and a lot more work. We have had to hire additional staff a few times already to cater for this at various points in time too.

All this does is increase our costs substantially, and annoy clients who ask why they need to do the ICP stuff yet again when they already did it.

Thank you China. Not.