Chinese domain owners lose addresses
By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
The recent undersea earthquake near Taiwan continues to cause chaos in the Asian region for Internet users, with Chinese .com domain name owners the latest casualty!
About 10,000 .com domain names owned by Chinese web users and companies were unable to be registered within the required time for expired domain names, causing 10,000 owners of .com domain names to lose the name due to non-registration.
The earthquake cut undersea telecommunications cables, disrupting Internet access across the Asian region, with services restored often only at slow speeds when services were re-routed.
The China International Network Information Center announced that the 10,000 Chinese .com owners had lost access to the domain names which were snapped up by other companies or spam website companies.
Some kind of compensation scheme is being discussed, but as the earthquake was ‘an act of God’, there’s no guarantee affected Chinese .com domain name owners really have any recourse.
Full service is set to be restored on January 15, but this will be no consolation to the 10,000 affected.
The lesson here?
Don’t wait until the last minute to renew your domain name, and certainly don’ t wait until after it has expired, safe in the knowledge that there is a set period of time available to you before it truly is available for others to register thanks to your non-action.
If your web address is important, make sure it’s promptly registered and this will never happen to you, acts of God notwithstanding.
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January 5th, 2007
This story has been since been denied by pretty much all of the Chinese authorities. It almost certainly did not happen. I explain this on http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/it/.
Liu Ningbo from HiChina Web Solutions, China’s largest domain registration service provider, said the losses are only possible in ‘theory’ but not in ‘reality’.
He said, ‘Internet users are reminded at least a month before their leased domain expires and the domain names are frozen and kept for one or two months after the expiry date.
Liu Ningbo said the company suspended its registration service for international domains for two days after the quake. He said, ‘People don’t have to rush to pay the leasing fee. They can retrieve their domain names by resuming the leasing fee within the time limit.’
Liu said that he had not seen a sudden loss of international domains since the quake.
I think he is probably right in this.
Gareth Powell