As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.

Chinese domains plummet again in 2023

There was almost no movement in the number of .cn domain names registered in 2023, according to the registry.

CNNIC had 20,125,764 .cn names under management at the end of last year, compared to 20,101,491 at the end of 2022, according to its recently published end-of-year report.

That’s an increase of under 25,000 domains, about a tenth as many net regs as fellow leading ccTLD .de, the domain for far less-populous Germany.

CNNIC also tracks the overall number of domains registered in-country, regardless of TLD, and that dropped dramatically again, following the trend of years.

There were 31,595,563 domains registered in China at the end of December, compared to 34,400,483 a year earlier, according to the report.

New gTLDs grow in China as .cn regs slide

China-based registrations of .cn domains decreased in the first half of last year, while new gTLD swelled to pick up the slack, according to the local registry’s semi-annual report.

CNNIC published the English translation of its first-half 2022 statistical report in December, showing a steep decline in .cn regs, from 20,410,139 at the end of 2021 to 17,861,269 at the end of June last year.

These appear to be registrations made by registrants based in China. Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief for Q2 2022 shows .cn at 20.6 million.

While .cn slumped, new gTLDs saw an uptick of almost a million names in China, from 3,615,751 domains to 4,590,705 over the six months. New gTLDs accounted for 13.6% of all China-registered domains, the CNNIC report says.

The report also shows that the number of Chinese-registered .com names dropped by about half a million, to 10,093,729 from 10,649,851, over the period.

The full report can be viewed here (pdf).

Domain universe shrinks again: .com and .cn down, .au up

The number of registered domain names in the world shrank again in the third quarter, with mixed results across various TLDs, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

There were 349.9 million names across all TLDs at the end of September, down 1.6 million sequentially but up 11.5 million compared to Q3 2021, the DNIB states.

The industry has downsized in every quarter this year, judging by Verisign’s numbers.

The company’s own .com, suffering from post-Covid blues, macroeconomic factors and (possibly) pricing issues, dragged the overall number down in Q3 by 200,000 domains, ending with 160.9 million.

But China’s .cn was hit harder, ending the period down from 20.6 million to 18 million. As I pondered in September, this may be due to how Verisign sources data.

Australia’s .au benefited from the launch of second-level availability, which boosted its number by 400,000 domains, ending with 4 million and overtaking .fr and .eu to become the seventh-largest ccTLD.

The ccTLD world overall shrunk sequentially by 1.7 million names but grew by 5.7 million on the year to end the quarter with 132.4 million.

New gTLDs ended with 27.3 million names, up 300,000 sequentially and 3.8 million year over year.

Millions of .cn domains disappear

China is reported another huge dip in domain registrations in the first half of the year, with millions of .cn names dropping.

CNNIC, the local registry, said yesterday that there were 17.86 million .cn names registered at the end of June, down from the 20.4 million it reported at the end of 2021 but above the 15.09 million it reported ago.

Such extreme fluctuations in Chinese registrations can often be explained by the country’s highly restrictive policies, which require registry and registrar licenses and registrant identification.

It remains to be seen how the numbers will effect the overall market trends Verisign reports with its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, where the .cn figures often do not tally with CNNIC’s published statistics.

China yanks Daily Stormer domain after Buffalo mass shooting

The far-right propaganda site The Daily Stormer has lost yet another domain name, after the Chinese ccTLD registry deleted dailystormer.cn.

The Daily Stormer was among the sites the suspect in this weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo reportedly cited as sources of his radicalization to a violent white-supremacist ideology.

Whois records show that dailystormer.cn was registered barely a month ago. The web site had previously been using a .name domain registered via a Chinese registrar, having TLD-hopped between various ccTLDs and gTLDs for years.

Today, English-language Chinese government-owned newspaper Global Times reported that the .cn domain has been taken down after registry CNNIC was alerted to the connection.

It’s no longer resolving from where I’m sitting, but Whois records indicate it was owned by Daily Stormer owner Andrew Anglin.

The web site, which cached copies show is filled with racist, sexist, homophobic and downright inaccurate posts, first ran afoul of domain registrars in 2017, when GoDaddy, Tucows and Google all kicked it out on the same day. Namecheap has also previously deleted one of its names.

It’s also been banned from ccTLDs from Albania, Austria, Iceland and Russia, along with gTLDs including .lol, .name, .red and .top.

China domain smaller than expected

The Chinese national ccTLD registry has reported 2018 registration figures below what outsiders had estimated.
CNNIC said last week (in Chinese) that it ended last year with 21.24 million .cn domain names under management.
That’s quite a lot below the 22.7 million domains reported by Verisign’s Q4 Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf).
It would also slip .cn into second-place after .tk in the ccTLD rankings, and into third place overall, if the DNIB’s estimate of .tk’s 21.5 million domains is accurate.
Tokelau’s repurposed ccTLD is unusual in that the registry does not delete domains that expire or are suspended for abuse, meaning it’s often excluded from growth comparisons.
China would still be comfortably ahead of Germany’s .de, the next-largest “real” ccTLD, with 16.2 million domains.
CNNIC added that it ended 2018 with 1.72 million registered domains in .中国 (.xn--fiqs8s), which is the Chinese name for China and the country’s internationalized domain name ccTLD.
CNNC has been coy about its reg numbers for the last couple of years.
It stopped publishing monthly totals on its web site in February 2017, when it had 20.8 million .cn domains under management.

Report names and shames most-abused TLDs

Newish gTLDs .tel and .xxx are among the most secure top-level domains, while .cn and .pw are the most risky.
That’s according to new gTLD services provider Architelos, which today published a report analyzing the prevalence of abuse in each TLD.
Assigning an “abuse per million domains” score to each TLD, the company found .tel the safest with 0 and .cn the riskiest, with a score of 30,406.
Recently relaunched .pw, which has had serious problems with spammers, came in just behind .cn, with a score of 30,151.
Generally, the results seem to confirm that the more tightly controlled the registration process and the more expensive the domain, the less likely it is to see abuse.
Norway’s .no and ICM Registry’s .xxx scored 17 and 27, for example.
Surprisingly, the free ccTLD for Tokelau, .tk, which is now the second-largest TLD in the world, had only 224 abusive domains per million under management, according to the report..
Today’s report ranked TLDs with over 100,000 names under management. Over 90% of the abusive domains used to calculate the scores were related to spam, rather than anything more nefarious.
The data was compiled from Architelos’ NameSentry service, which aggregates abusive URLs from numerous third-party sources and tallies up the number of times each TLD appears.
The methodology is very similar to the one DI PRO uses in TLD Health Check, but Architelos uses more data sources. NameSentry is also designed to automate the remediation workflow for registries.

China cracks down on new gTLD applicants

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.

Domain universe breaks through 200 million

VeriSign is reporting that the number of registered domain names worldwide broke through the 200 million mark in the third quarter.
There were 202 million domains at the end of September, according to the company’s Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published today.
Over half of those domains, 103 million names in total, can be found in the .com and .net namespaces that VeriSign manages.
In a not-so-subtle plug for VeriSign’s 2011 growth strategy, the company also declared that the next ten years will be “The Decade of the International Internet”.

In the coming decade, the Internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fueled in part by the adoption of IDNs. By enabling online content and businesses to be represented in local scripts and languages, IDNs help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures, and connect the world in new ways. Over the past year, several new IDNs for ccTLDs have been approved. The next step will be approval of IDNs for generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

The company, of course, plans to apply to ICANN to operate IDN versions of .com and .net, although it has not to date discussed openly which languages or strings it wants.
The VeriSign report also says that ccTLD registrations grew 2.4%, compared to the same quarter last year, to 79.2 million domains.
I expect this growth would have been tempered had it not been for the relaunch of .co, which occurred during the quarter, but it does not merit a mention in the report.
The report also reveals that .info has overtaken .cn in the biggest-TLD charts, although this is due primarily to the plummeting number of registrations in the Chinese ccTLD.