CNNIC expects that within two years, majority of the country?s Web sites will have domain names that end in the two Chinese characters for “China,” rather than the .cn top-level domain. It also expects those domain names to become the most widely visited by Chinese Internet users.

Then, the agency targets standardizing the use of Chinese-language domains worldwide. China and other countries have asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet’s governance body, to pass an implementation plan for certain country-level domains in local languages during the organization’s meeting in October.

If the plan passes, then global root servers by next year should support the Chinese-language version of the country’s top-level domain, said Zhang.

Chinese-language domains would boost Internet penetration in China and be easier for local users to remember than versions written in English, she said.

Although some Web sites in China already support Chinese versions of both their top- and second-level domains, the English-language domains seems to be the most widely used especially in advertisements.

CNNIC now gives registrants who apply for a domain name ending in .cn the same domain with Chinese characters as its top level as well. Registrants also have the option to choose between the traditional and simplified Chinese versions of their top-level domain, said Zhang.

Simplified Chinese is the script for the language used in China and Singapore, while Taiwan and Hong Kong use more complex traditional characters. The disadvantage of the simplified version of a top=level domain is that an attacker could attempt to steal visitor information by registering the traditional version and drawing users to it instead.

China has the most number of internet users in any country. As of the end of June, there were 338 million registered Internet users according to CNNIC.

Source : Konaxis