On April 28, 2010, China Internet Network information Center (CNNIC) declared in Beijing that the international application of traditional and simplified “.中国” domain names submitted by CNNIC had passed the policy evaluation of channel express made by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Meanwhile, “上海世博会.中国”, the “.中国” domain name for 2010 Shanghai Expo has been officially opened for the opening of Expo.

International Application of Traditional “.中国” Domain Names officially passed Evaluation

On November 16, 2009, the initiation ceremony for international application of “.中国” domain names was held in Beijing by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Witnessed and supported by many representatives of renowned internet enterprises in China such as Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, Alipay, Firefox, OPERA, Maxthon, Xinhuanet.com, People.com, Sina.com and Tencent.com, CNNIC, on behalf of China, officially submitted an international application for “.中国” domain names to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

On April 22, 2010, the board of ICANN passed the latest resolution and approved that the international application of traditional and simplified “.中国” domain names submitted by CNNIC on behalf of China had officially passed evaluation. Since then, “.中国” domain names have entered into a period of “technical deployment”. It is estimated that billions of net citizens using Chinese language will be able to visit internet using pure Chinese domain names in any corner of the world in a few months.

In the Press Conference this time, in order to help the Chinese in the globe understand the latest trend of Shanghai Expo through internet using their native language, Shanghai Expo, while using expo2010.cn, also initiated the utilization of “上海世博会.中国” that is easy to be used and remembered. “上海世博会.中国” will not only become a window for net citizens of Chinese language in the globe to understand Expo, but also make Shanghai Expo marked with the Chinese brand.

Two Technical Equivalences Make Users’ Utilization of “.中国” Domain Names Convenien

The fact that both traditional and simplified “.中国” domain names has passed the ICANN evaluation means that the Chinese in the globe, according to their habit of using language, can accurately log on the website of Peking University by typing in the Chinese domain name either in the form of traditional “北京大學.中國” or simplified “北京大学.中国”.

As English character “.” and Chinese full stop “。” are fully equivalent, hundreds of millions of net citizens can accurately log on the website of Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China by typing in either “教育部。中国” (Chinese full stop) or “教育部.中国” (English characters), which are of the same effect. This means that massive net citizens can open the location bar and type in the “.中国” domain name of the website for visit from Chinese input status such as chatting and search at any time.

Up to now, over 90% of Ministries and Commissions of the State as well as provincial government organs, over 95% of media and news websites, over 90% of national key universities of Project 211, over 50% of China Top 100 enterprises and over 40% of China Top 500 enterprises have successively opened “.中国” domain names.

In order to protect the benefits of potential domain name registers at the largest extent in the current stage, the present registration policy of Chinese domain names provide users who have applied for “Chinese.CN” the opportunity to automatically obtain the relevant “Chinese.中国” domain names of both traditional and simplified versions.

Early in the 1998, CNNIC started its research on Chinese domain names. Meanwhile, it has successively completed the formulation of two international standards of internet and solved the unified problems of variant Chinese characters and anamorphosis fonts in the domain name encoding and equivalent issues of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. The technical research and international application around global top-level domain names of pure Chinese language in the world has been carried out for more than ten years up to now. 

 

 

CNNIC

 

JUL 16th, 2010