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China cracks down on new gTLD applicants

Kevin Murphy, March 2, 2012, 09:02:42 (UTC), Domain Policy

Chinese companies planning to apply to ICANN for a new generic top-level domain will have to get a permit from the government, it has been announced.
Applicants will have to reveal their services, their contingency plans, and their trademark protection and anti-abuse procedures, among other details, to China before applying.
The news, which could be troubling to some Chinese gTLD applicants, came in an official Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announcement yesterday.
A local source confirmed that the Ministry plans to issue permits to new gTLD applicants.
It seems to apply to any gTLD, but a second set of regulations to govern the obtaining of government non-objection letters in the case of geographic strings has also been introduced.
These rules seem to apply only to local companies. As far as I know China is not yet claiming exclusive ownership of the Chinese language and script as it has in the past.
I also hear on the grapevine that China thinks ICANN is subject to a business tax on its $185,000 application fees, and that applicants are being asked to pre-pay this tax on ICANN’s behalf.
The nation has form when it comes to heavy-handed domain name industry regulation.
Rules forcing registrants to submit ID when they register .cn domain names have caused the number of ccTLD registrations to plummet over the last couple of years.
The .cn space peaked at about 14 million domains under management in 2009 and stands at just 3.3 million today.

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