Verisign has approached ICANN with a request to amend the services it provides as a registry for the .COM and .NET generic top-level domains. The company wants to bring its policy into line with the very stringent requirements of Chinese law. This is an understandable move as the Chinese market is very important to Verisign. Thus, the decrease in the number of registered names in the domain zones managed by the company in the 2nd quarter of this year is primarily due to the fact that many domains previously registered by Chinese investors for speculative purposes were not renewed.
In China, there is a law according to which registration of a domain name is possible only upon presentation of a government-issued ID. Appropriate verification for Verisign and other companies operating in the country's market is usually carried out by local providers and registrars. When confirming the identity of the registrant, they assign a special code to his application, on the basis of which the registration of the domain name is carried out.
However, in the .COM and .NET zones, there are a number of domain names registered without this code. According to representatives of Verisign, we are talking about a "very small percentage" of domains, but the exact numbers are not disclosed. The new Verisign rules suggest that registration of domains by Chinese registrants without a confirmation code will be fundamentally impossible. In addition, the registry will have the right to block transfers of names previously registered without identity verification, not to renew their registration, and to delete them completely. Resource Domain Incite, reporting this news, notes that if the changes in the rules are approved by ICANN, they could theoretically be extended to any country. However, in reality, they are introduced for the sole purpose of complying with the law of the China.
