China bans individuals from registering domain names

http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=708864

by joe_bleau • 17 years ago

103 85 17 years ago

CWuestefeld7• 17 years ago

How ironic is that? A country that was supposed to have been founded on (Mao's interpretation of) Marxist principles, giving power to the people over the capitalist extremes, will now refuse Internet domain to those people; only businesses, those tools of capitalism, get this privilege.

DannoHung2• 17 years ago

I think it's clear that no Communist nation has ever succeeded in being the bastion of democratic, personal freedom that it was ever intended to be.

I actually sort of feel bad for Karl Marx. I mean, dude just wanted people to live happier lives and not worry about owning stuff so much. Now he's forever tied to some of the most oppressive regimes in modern history.

Idealism fail.

aaronblohowiak2• 17 years ago

Maoism is not marxism, not that China is practicing Maoism today anyway. There are models of collective ownership that pre-date Marx.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

> I think it's clear that no Communist nation has ever succeeded in being the bastion of democratic, personal freedom that it was ever intended to be.

Nuh-uh, no, you can't give him this sort of pass. He introduced the concept of "class struggle" and "class warfare" that took over so much of modern labor/monetary/commerce/market vocabulary, and specifically said that the transition to socialism/communism will take proletariat violence. The man has inspired as much harm and destruction as any person in history.

And he's not even right - his labor theory of value is so completely flawed it's hard to know where to start debunking. He had it in mind that there was a "socially necessary abstract labor-time" of every action - which take a very limited view based on a very limited period in history. Take for instance, Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization. How much socially necessary abstract labor-time was that worth? Ten million units of necessary abstract labor-time? How much was creating GMail worth? How much abstract labor time is Picasso's best work worth, compared to Matisse?

Publius Syrius said back in Roman times, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." - and so far, that's the only model we've found that does a decent job of handling contributions without going to totalitarianism. When you start letting third parties dictate value to people who want to buy and sell, you throw the world off equilibrium, you get black markets and create a new class of crime.

I'd implore you to please, please, please stop seeing Marx as a misguided would-be hero. Almost every bad person in history thought of themself that way. Marx's works were both incorrect from an academic standpoint, very emotionally appealing to certain kinds of people, and generally fostered violence and hostility between groups of people that do the best when they work together to create the best world together. Marx was no friend of humanity, and should be remembered as someone who had bad and violent ideas that led to millions of people oppressed and killed as part of the "proletariat revolution to overthrow the bourgeois". Marx brought this kind of thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_rouge

Please, please get educated and stop whimsically giving him a nod. The man's philosophies have led to more misery than just about anyone else in history.

rms• 17 years ago

Unfortunately Mao was too ignorant to properly implement his own ideals.

idlewords• 17 years ago

Zero ironic? Private ownership of a communal resource is not Maoist.

drtse44• 17 years ago

I didn't expect that something like this could ever happen... ok,it's China, but still unbelievable.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

China executed people for being involved in a non-violent protest. And then they sent bills home to the relatives of the deceased for the cost of the bullets.

In that context, this sort of thing should not be the least surprising.

drtse44• 17 years ago

I'm aware of that, i just didn't expect them to care about domain registrations when they can persecute the individual site owners. But i guess that that way there will be less work for them to do.

joubert3• 17 years ago

What happened if they refused to pay? I also wonder what would have happened if you showed it as a tax deductible in further sign of protest.

joshfinnie2• 17 years ago

I thought this was pretty standard for some country specific TLDs. I looked up Ireland's rules once and it seemed as though I couldn't get a domain name since I wasn't a business in Ireland.

(I guess this has resently changed per wikipedia: "Registration policies have been liberalised somewhat in recent years and rules such as the one against registering generic domain names have been dropped. Applicants for .ie domain names still have to provide proof of entitlement to the domain that they want to register."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ie)

drtse44• 17 years ago

As far as i remember, the .it domain was also limited to businesses until 1999, what we see in China is something going in the opposite direction, sadly.

coliveira2• 17 years ago

In a sense, this is good for the US economy, because it means that China is out of the game in terms of entrepreneurial activities on the web.

cmgarcia• 17 years ago

In what world are you living in that less competition is good?

drtse44• 17 years ago

And also, consider that even if at the moment China has no significant web activities outside its borders, the internet population in China is bigger than the one in the US or Europe, and every move/law that leads to less freedom in the access to the network could damage a potential market.

thijsterlouw• 17 years ago

Hope this will be one of those rules that is never really going to be implemented/enforced, but if some websites are really already unavailable, that doesn't bode well...

est• 17 years ago

Meanwhile Godaddy opens Alipay (most popular one in China, kinda like Paypal) for the convenience of the Chinese.

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

This is a very misleading article. The restriction is only on .CN domain names and is in line with plenty of other domain types around the world, for example .co.jp.

Here's the original source:

http://business.globaltimes.cn/china-economy/2009-12/491515....

joe_bleau• 17 years ago

Thanks for the link. (Odd, my submission must have been moderated, as I submitted a ft.com link, not the telecompaper.com one...)

joubert3• 17 years ago

So an individual is also prohibited from registering a .co.jp? It seams reasonable to me to restrict .gov.x or .edu.x, but .co.x?

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

I don't know about .co.jp, but individuals can definitely register .co.uk domains. I know because I own one.

whatusername• 17 years ago

Australia provides a .id.au for individuals. .com.au is reserved for "businesses". (Since no-one (outside of places like HN) has ever heard of .id.au we either use .com or register a bus. name to get the .com.au)

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

A .co.jp can only be registered by a proper company, yeah. You know .. .COmpany.JP :)

A plain .jp, however, has no such restrictions; individuals can buy them.

Seems reasonable to restrict any of them to their intended registrees. Just because the USA didn't enforce it (and now the namespace is an absolute mess) doesn't mean other countries shouldn't.

anigbrowl4• 17 years ago

Ireland did something similar for a while. They would refuse registrations that were 'too general' (eg cars.co.ie) on the grounds that they should be reserved for people who were capable of handling them ie established businesses. There was no lobbying to do this, it was just the natural thing to do, in their eyes.

I think this Chinese effort is equally misguided, but I assume some of it has to do with trying to cut off domain tasters and spammers at the knees. Consider that China doesn't have anything like the same level of consumer protection/awareness as Western countries; I don't think it's necessarily an attack on entrepreneurs or free speech.

illumen• 17 years ago

Also .com.au requires a business number to register. There are other restrictions too. Similarly .asn.au can only be registered by non-commercial organisations.

Also many european business domains are restricted to eu businesses etc.

This is very common amongst many registrars... and is a good thing generally... I think.

bootload2• 17 years ago

"... Also .com.au requires a business number to register. There are other restrictions too. Similarly .asn.au can only be registered by non-commercial organisations. ..."

Thanks to kre (Kevin Robert Elz) ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Robert_Elz you cannot get a ".com.au" domain name without having a registered business name. The idea was to stop domain name speculation ~ http://www.passioncomputing.com.au/Articles/Australian-domai... Good in the short term when one person was administering domain names, not so good now as it adds extra overhead for a ".com.au" small market.

fsniper• 17 years ago

In Turkey, there is a similar process for com.tr domain names. You have to provide some sort of business or trade mark registration documents to be able to register com.tr

sili• 17 years ago

Another example where powers-that-have been are trying to stop inevitable future with restrictions and fines. The way it's done is noteworthy also: instead of targeting pornography on personal sites in particular they have banned any one person from having a personal site at all* . This is akin to chasing flies with a baseball bat.

*At lest independent sites that are not created through some service, a la Blogger, and which it would be labor-intense for the government to police one by one.

Edit: err, now I know how to italicize in HN

d64• 17 years ago

Up to until a few years ago .fi domains could only be registered by a company or other organization matching the name of the domain.

I sort of liked that system. There were almost no vanity/"spam" domains in the TLD.

blue1• 17 years ago

same for .it

joubert3• 17 years ago

How difficult / expensive is it to set up a company in China?

megaduck• 17 years ago

I don't think this changes much. You've always needed a government license to run a server, so virtually everybody either already had government permission or was running their stuff out of Hong Kong.

This the new ban looks more like they're making sure that everybody with a .cn is "in the system". You can still start a website, you just need to go through one of the approved vendors for a domain name.

I'm not in China any more, so jhancock or some of the other China guys can probably tell you more.

China bans individuals from registering domain names

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