China's Internet body says no domain names lost after all

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 06 January 2007 11:48

Your IT - Home IT

Beijing News’ report on 10,000 lost domain names according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) is now said by China Daily, a Chinese news web site, to be wrong, with the CNNIC denying that it made those comments. So, what’s going on?!

When I read the original story on 10,000 domain names being lost because network connectivity problems in Asia thanks to the earthquake meant those registrants couldn’t pay for their domains on time sounded a bit strange.

In yesterday’s iTWire article, I did suggest that if you didn’t want the same thing to happen to you, earthquake or no, you shouldn’t let your domain name expire and then not pay it for so long that the ‘grace period’ runs out and you lose access to the domain name altogether.

That’s what was said to have happened to the 10,000 Chinese .com domain name holders. Still, in a country with well over a billion people that manufacturers much of the world’s electronic technology, is a country that’s growing and modernizing itself so rapidly and has an ever increasing number of Internet users, 10,000 people being affected seemed relatively plausible.

Well, according to the CNNIC, China's authorized domain name registration manager and administrator, it didn’t, with China Daily reporting that the CNNIC denied making the remarks when China Daily contacted them on Friday.

CNNIC statistics show that China had nearly 3 million domain names by July 2006. Of those, almost 50% were .com domain names, with 40% were Chinese .cn domain names.

The head of China’s largest domain registration service, Liu Ningbo of HiChina Web Solutions Ltd told China Daily he had not seen any sudden loss of international domains in China since the earthquake.

So, while the initial news seems to have been wrong, there undoubtedly have been connectivity problems following the earthquake.

This highlights the fact that while the Internet is designed to overcome such problems, which indeed it did albeit with slower access for users across Asia, countries need to work together to further upgrade and provide redundancy to our global network to stand better prepared and able to cope with future with similar events in the future.

After all, as Sun always likes to say… the network is the computer, and no-one wants to lose access to it!

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