At the end of last week, Chinese national registry CNNIC, which manages the .CN national domain, published the number of names registered in this domain. This is a rare event these days. For reasons unknown, starting in February 2017, the registry stopped publishing monthly reports on registration numbers; thus only rough estimates on the number of names registered in the .CN domain have been made by various sources.
Verisign company’s Domain Name Industry Brief stated that by the end of 2018, .CN had a total of 22.7 million registered names. The numbers published by CNNIC are somewhat different: it turns out that by the end of 2018 the domain had 21.24 million names registered. This statistic makes .CN the runner-up in the list of the largest national domains, with Tokelau’s national domain .TK being home to 21.5 million registered names (according to the same DNIB report). However, one should keep in mind that the .TK domain barely qualifies as a national domain, with its free registration and zero removal policy even when the domain names in question fail to extend their registration period. However, .CN remains the leader among purely national domains, outpacing its German runner-up .DE, which hosts 16.2 million registered names. Citing CNNIC, Domain Incite reports that by the end of last year, China’s internationalized domain name .中国 had a total of 1.72 million names.
