Afilias EVP Ram Mohan (left) meets CNNIC director general Mao Wei (right).
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As the importance of the Chinese domain market and internationalized domain name technology rise to the fore, Internet infrastructure services provider Afilias (www.afilias.info) has joined the Chinese Domain Name Consortium (www.cdnc.org).
According to its Thursday announcement, Afilias will work with the CDNC to coordinate and collaborate with other registries to reach Chinese language Internet users with IDN technology. With the goal of harmonizing, promoting and self-regulating registry operations and services of Chinese domain names, CDNC was established in 2000 by four Network Information Centers in the Chinese speaking community: CNNIC, TWNIC, HKIRC and MONIC.
“The importance of the Chinese domain name market cannot be understated,” Afilias executive vice president and chief technology officer Ram Mohan said in a statement. “With more Chinese language Internet users than the entire population of the US, and the availability of domain names in the Chinese language using Internationalized Domain Name technology, China is a high priority market for Afilias.”
Afilias is a registry services provider to nearly 15 million domain names between 15 top-level domains. CDNC co-chairman Qian Hualin said Afilias has strengthened the CDNC. “It is a great showcase of the increasing interest and influence towards web addressing in Chinese characters, particularly given that ICANN is planning to launch its new policies on new TLD and IDN applications,” Hualin said in a statement.
Mohan said some of the topics Afilias will collaborate on with the CDNC is administration standards for Chinese domain names, variant management at the second and top level, 3-character domains, as well as DNS security issues like spam, phishing and botnets.
Its work with Chinese domains is Afilias’ latest partnership in support of establishing industry standards. In May, the WHIR interviewed Afilias senior vice president and chief marketing officer Roland LaPlante, who explained Afilias’ long history of supporting online safety and its recent participation with new organizations and initiatives.
In late April, Brian Cute, vice president of Afilias’ discovery services division, was named to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Online Safety and Technology Working Group, established by the US government’s “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” in order to promote online safety through different educational efforts.
It also joined the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (www.maawg.org) as part of its ongoing domain name anti-abuse efforts, making it the first domain name registry operator to become a member organization.
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