China domains dip in 2026

Both of China’s ccTLD saw their domains under management slide in 2026, according to the latest biannual report from the local registry.

CNNIC said that .cn names ended the year at 20,768,082, down by almost 50,000 from the 20,768,082 names it reported a year earlier and down about 88,000 on its mid-year number.

The internationalized domain name .中国 (.xn--fiqs8s) also continued its downward trajectory, at 159,480 at the end of the year, compared to 165,265 at the end.

The IDN has been going down consistently every half for at least the last five years. Back in 2021, it had over 210,000 names. This in a country of 1.4 billion people.

Chinese domain spikiness ends in first half

China’s typically lumpy .cn domain market seemed to stabilize in the first half of 2025, posting modest growth rather than wild fluctuations.

While local registry CNNIC does not seem to have published its full H1 statistical report yet, it said in a press release this week that the were 20.85 million .cn domains registered at the end of June.

That compares to the 20.82 million names it had at the end of 2024, representing basically flattish growth.

In previous quarters, the world’s second-largest TLD had seen its numbers all over the shop, with growth of 1.2 million names in H224 and a dip of 563,000 in H124.

CNNIC said the total number of domains registered in China was 32.62 million. No further breakdowns were available.

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 say internet not ready for single-letter gTLDs

Several major Chinese tech organizations have urged ICANN not to lift its ban on single-character gTLDs, saying the risk of confusion is too great.

Allowing single-character gTLDs in Han script was the most objected-to part of the draft Applicant Guidebook in ICANN’s just-closed public comment period, with the objections all coming from China.

Han script is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. A single character can convey the same semantic impact as a whole multi-character word in European languages.

But the commenters warned that a single character can have multiple meanings, increasing the risk of confusion.

Rui Zhong of the Internet Society of China said for example that the Han character “新” can mean “new” but is also the abbreviation for the Chinese province of Xinjiang and the nation of Singapore.

Lang Wang of CNNIC warned: “the similarities in pronunciation, form, and meaning of Han script single-character gTLD could lead to the risks of phishing, homophone attacks, intellectual property disputes, etc”.

It seems the issue may be a bit more complex than visually identical words having multiple definitions in other languages, with multiple commenters saying that single-character words do not reflect the reality of modern Chinese usage.

China loses over half a million domains

The Chinese ccTLD .cn shrunk by over half a million domains in the first half of the year, according to the latest semiannual report from the local registry.

There were 19,562,007 registered .cn names at the end of June, down from 20,125,764 at the end of 2023, a decline of 563,757 domains, according to the CNNIC report.

Despite the decline, .cn is still the largest ccTLD, ahead of the 17,703,602 that Germany’s DENIC (.de) reported June 30.

The dip is not surprising. Verisign has pointed to weakness in China as a reason .com’s volume has been tumbling in recent quarters.

The fact that .cn is going down too suggests the negative growth is in fact due to macroeconomic factors rather that Chinese .com registrants migrating to their local ccTLD.

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).

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.