Chinese Character Domains Available for Use
Accessing Websites by Direct Input of Chinese Domain Names in the Browser
On 3 August 2010, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) announced the approval of using Chinese characters in either simplified or traditional forms (i.e. "中国" and "中國" ) in top-level domain names by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the overseer of the Internet's naming system headquartered in the United States.
The acceptance of domain names in Chinese characters represents another step forward in the internationalization of country/region code domains since ICANN granted its first approval of non-Western scripts for domain names to Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last April, following its approval of allowing other languages as the characters of internet top-level domain characters in June 2008. Prior to that, only 37 characters including the Latin letters A-Z, the Arabic numbers 0-9, and the hyphen could be used to make up domain names.
Following the approval of Chinese domain names, users of China websites may directly register Chinese names into domain names in the form of "中国" and "中國" and net citizens can visit relevant websites by directly entering the registered domain names in Chinese in the location bar of browser. Said decision also applies to sites using Hong Kong and Taiwan in their country/region codes, permitting as well the use of both traditional and simplified Chinese characters (i.e. ".香港", ".台湾", ".台灣").
The successful entry of Chinese domains into global root domain name system is attributive to a decade's efforts largely by CNNIC, in carrying out Chinese language domain research and in overcoming technical barriers, such as variant Chinese characters and anamorphosis fonts in the domain name encoding and issues concerning traditional and simplified Chinese characters.
It is reported that by now, over 90% of Chinese ministries and provincial government organs, over 95 percent of news websites, over 90% of China's "211 Project" key universities, and over 50% of China Top 100 enterprises have successively set up ".中国" domain names.
