China will block .com's for a competive edge.

[Chris Rice]

The above statement is just a prediction of mine. Blocking .com's for an unfair advantage over US company's would not be beyond them and it is definitely doable. Verisign does not even have a license to use or sell .com's in China, it was only tolerated. But that might change very soon (effective March 1, 2016)

Research MIIT, the Chinese government organization that regulates the internet and domain names in China. This has all been talked about for quite sometime, long before Google re-organized under abc.xyz (do some research for once). It was also well understood that .xyz and .club would be two of the first foreign registrars to get a license in China.

According to Daniel Negari, XYZ is the only U.S. registrar to apply for a license in China AND coordinate with ICANN about it. While a lot of .com loyalists have been bashing new GTLD's a lot of people have been in the background hand registering cheap domain names. A lot of large .COM portfolio holders already sold out and domain name news outlets are slowly easing on their criticism.

TheDomains was right, it will take an intense marketing campaign by at least 2 to 3 major brands. He mentions the Super Bowl as a good example and if you do some research, that is exactly what's happening.

ChrisRice.xyz

 

[dordomai]

So you believe that .com will get banned?

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

So you believe that .com will get banned?

i hope so ...

 

[dordomai]

i hope so ...

LOL. Even if it were banned it wouldn't help .xyz

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

Seeking Access to Facebook in China, Zuckerberg Courts Risks

Mark Zuckerberg in China.

• Mr. Zuckerberg, the Facebookfounder, returned to Beijing for yet another trip that drew local headlines and captivated online China. He wrote a post that went viral about ajog through Tiananmen Square; held a widely covered conversation with China’s best-known entrepreneur, Jack Ma of Alibaba; and on Saturdaymet with one of the most powerful men in China, Liu Yunshan, the country’s propaganda chief.
  Video Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Ma of Alibaba discussed the state of the Chinese economy at a forum in Beijing on Saturday.
  It followed previous trips in which Mr. Zuckerberg impressed Chinese audiences with his rookie Chinese language skills and spoke about his fascination with the country. Even at times while he was outside China, hemet with China’s president, Xi Jinping; told a Chinese official he was reading a book of Mr. Xi’s words and gave his newborn daughter, Max, a Chinese name. (It is Chen Mingyu.)
• 
  
• it is CHAN MINGYU ( after her Mother Priscilla Chan )
• people believe what they see nad don,t listen anymore
  
  The visits have cemented his place as one of the best-known foreign business executives in China. But it is far from clear whether his charm offensive will unlock Mr. Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal: persuading the Chinese government to lift its ban on the social media service and open it to the country’s almost 700 million Internet users.
  
  Courting Chinese leaders in such a public fashion is an unusual strategy for a foreign executive. With star power comes influence, and any clout not directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party can be deemed dangerous. China demonstrated this last month, when a widely read social media account of a prominent real estate tycoon disappeared after he criticized Mr. Xi’s call for unswerving loyalty from the country’s media.
  
  The few American technology firms that have entered China in recent years have played down their efforts. Though Travis Kalanick, a founder of Uber, frequently travels to China, news of his presence rarely spreads across the Chinese Internet. There was almost no fanfare in advance of LinkedIn’s deal with two closely connected Chinese venture capital shops to enter China, an event that was marked with a blog post.
  
  If Mr. Zuckerberg succeeds, it could show other foreign companies blocked in China that they have a potential path into the huge and fast-growing market — one that calls for them to accept China’s strict controls on discourse and to refrain from rocking the boat. A failure would underscore Chinese distrust of foreign technology companies and cement the idea that the low-profile approach is the only way to gain market access.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s meeting with Mr. Liu — a rarity for an American business executive — underscores the dynamic. Mr. Liu sits on the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, the summit of power in China. The meeting serves China’s propaganda purposes, allowing the country to show that one of the titans of America’s new tech-based economy is happy to pay homage to China’s leaders and its style of Internet governance.

If there is anyone Facebook has to win over, it is Mr. Liu, who has for years presided over the controls on China’s highly censored and stage-managed media.

At the meeting, Mr. Liu lauded Facebook’s technology prowess, but he also emphasized the importance of Internet governance “with Chinese characteristics,” according to an official state news media account, a reference to censorship and surveillance within China.

Mr. Zuckerberg praised China’s progress in building an advanced Internet and vowed to work with Chinese peers to “build a better world in cyberspace,” according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a photo of himself smiling as he jogged past the Mao Zedong portrait in Tiananmen Square. He avoided mentioning both the violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators there in 1989 and that morning’s dangerous air pollution levels.

During the discussion with Mr. Ma, the Alibaba founder, on Saturday, Mr. Zuckerberg also generally avoided sensitive topics, speaking instead about artificial intelligence and what should motivate entrepreneurs. He also praised China’s emphasis on engineering, saying that he believed it would help solve future labor shortages associated with high-technology jobs.

“In general we’re seeing a huge constraint around the world on the number of good engineers who are graduating from universities,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “And I think this is something that China has gotten really right by emphasizing for a long time.”

China’s state-run television broadcaster China Central Television posted a social media message that included a photo of Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who is Chinese-American. Next to the photo, a cartoon character declares, “A son-in-law of China!”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/2...risks.html?referer=https://www.google.com.ph/

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

LOL. Even if it were banned it wouldn't help .xyz

it would change the internet and this is good

 

[dordomai]

Why would it be good?

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

Why would it be good?

because people live in habit

for example :

Mark Zuckerberg named her daughter after his wife Priscilla Chan : CHAN MINGYU
but the translations says Chen Mingyu

People believe what they see and don,t listen anymore
he even mentioned that he named her after Priscilla Chan

so i gues it is time that people start to get more attention again
if China would block .com the people would maybe start to think again

https://www.namepros.com/threads/who-is-chan-mingyu.941380/

 

[TRY]

I would just like to say although i may differ on your interpretation and future outlook I respect and appreciate you putting links to the sources of information so we may read, disect, and come to our own conclusions, unlike some of the other new gtld proponents who just want people believe what they believe just because, P.s. you say you may soon invest in cctld's, problem is the longer you wait the less opportunities you will have, domaining 101.

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

i guess .com is .communism ( chinas online market )

 

[Kate]

Verisign signs deal with China’s CNNIC for real name verification

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

Verisign signs deal with China’s CNNIC for real name verification

you waste our time

 

[Chris Rice]

China’s Internet censorship: A WTO challenge is long overdue
Economics, Technology and Innovation

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For the first time this year, the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR’s) “National Trade Estimate Report” took note of China’s Great Firewall. Granted, it was with this tame statement: “China’s filtering of cross-border Internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers.” The report did not indicate what steps, if any, the US plans to take against the People’s Republic of China’s heavy-handed and economically damaging censorship regime. But it is high time for the US, possibly in conjunction with other major trading partners, to test the legality of China’s sweeping Internet censorship system.


A picture illustration shows icons of WeChat and Weibo app in Beijing, December 5, 2013. Reuters

The nature of Chinese censorship
Chinese online censorship operations are not new, and they have been well-documented for over a decade. But the situation has grown worse since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012. Today, the USTR reports that eight of the 25 most trafficked websites worldwide are currently blocked by the Chinese government. Especially targeted are popular search engines such as Google, as well as user-generated content platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Sometimes, the blockade is permanent — Google formally withdrew from China in 2010 — but more often it is intermittent and random, as has occurred with increasing frequency with Gmail and Hotmail. The New York Times has been banned since 2012, and recently (as a result of reporting on the misdeeds of President Xi’s relatives)the Economist and Time magazine have also secured spots on the honored block list. Just last week, Beijing further tightened the screws on US companies when it imposed a ban on Apple’s online book and film services. The order came as part of a broader set of regulations, introduced in March, which established strict curbs on all online publishing.

In many cases, the filters and blocks carry with them a strong whiff of industrial policy. The now-giant Chinese firm Baidu received a huge boost when Google was forced to withdraw from the Chinese market (Baidu stock shot up 16 percent the day Google announced its withdrawal). Sina’s Weibo and Tencent’s QQ are direct competitors to popular blocked websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Even a seemingly innocuous photo-sharing site such Flickr has been banned, much to the benefit of a direct Chinese competitor, Bababian, which has blossomed with the aid of foreign technology.

Using WTO rules and legal precedent to challenge Chinese censorship
When challenged to defend its “purge” of foreign Internet firms, Chinese officials invoke World Trade Organization (WTO) escape clauses that allow governments to intervene to protect “public morals” or “public order.” But there are several legal challenges the US could raise, based on WTO rules.

First, when China achieved WTO membership, it assumed substantial obligations under the WTO’s “General Agreement on Trade in Services” (GATS). GATS imposes a number of across-the-board mandates relating to transparency, impartiality, non-discrimination in government actions, and opportunity for independent judicial review of administrative decisions. With respect to Chinese Internet censorship, the rights of foreign companies outlined in GATS have rarely been honored. Often, China has provided no prior notice or explanation of its actions, reference to a particular law or regulatory rule, or provision for appeal to an independent body. These due process violations could form one route for arguing a WTO case.

But there are potentially deeper, more specific WTO rules violations. In addition to the more general obligations listed above, China (and other WTO members) have undertaken direct commitments regarding individual sectors — and specifically commitments relating to web-based services as well as broader value-added telecommunications services. While there has been no case that directly challenges online censorship by WTO members, there is WTO case law suggesting that WTO panels and the WTO Appellate Body would rein in sweeping censorship rules.

In a 2005 case regarding online gambling, which pitted the US against Antigua, the WTO Appellate Body ruled that, once a WTO member had agreed to commitments regarding a service sector (in this case the US with gambling), it could not maintain GATS-violating bans on that sector. Specifically, it held that bans would be considered “zero quotas,” which violate on their face GATS rules in liberalized sectors. In a more recent case involving China’s attempt to regulate and ban the import of US publications and audiovisual material, the Appellate Body refused to accept China’s invocation of public morals as a defense for widespread foreign book and movie banning. The WTO thus clarified that the public morals exception could only be invoked for narrow, individual circumstances, and was not a license for unrestricted censorship.

What are next steps?
The key issues going forward relate to necessity and proportionality. That is, did China have other means to achieve the protection of public morals, and were their actions proportional to the goal? Here, the question of “selective filtering” (censoring) versus a total ban comes to the forefront. As the authors of a leading academic study of these issues state: “It is self-evident that active filtering of search results is less trade restrictive than a total, permanent ban of the site since the latter course would at least preserve the economic rights of the foreign undertaking. The mere existence of selective filtering strongly argues that arbitrary and entire blockages or permanent bans on sites based on search-and-retrieve functionality . . . ought to be considered as disproportionate.”

Though there are still complexities and unanswered questions relating to the use of the WTO legal system, the cases cited above have both direct and broad implications for China’s extensive censorship operations. The logic of these decisions would seem to create strong grounds for challenging China’s sweeping, total bans on services provided by Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other foreign-based operations. It is time for the Obama administration to test the implications and reach of the WTO judicial body’s decisions with a case directly challenging China’s Internet censorship

https://www.aei.org/publication/chinas-internet-censorship-a-wto-challenge-is-long-overdue/

 

[Chris Rice]

Why would it be good?

.XYZ is in the process of getting approved by the MIIT in China. It will join the ranks of less than 20 fully approved TLDs in China.

 

[Chris Rice]

Why would it be good?

Here are some articles about their efforts to get approved in China. I am guessing that they will get approved in the next 2 to 6 months and that a price surge for .XYZ will follow:
https://gen.xyz/china

 

[Chris Rice]

Verisign signs deal with China’s CNNIC for real name verification

Not what I was hoping for but nice article.

It provided an additional link that provides more informatiom:
http://www1.cnnic.cn/AU/MediaC/rdxw/2016/201604/t20160429_53602.htm

 

[Chris Rice]

1st Japan, now Korea.

Verisign on 2016 expectations and IDNs

BY ANDREW ALLEMANN — APRIL 29, 2016UNCATEGORIZED 0 COMMENTS

Company warns Q4 might see a drop, says more IDNs on the way.

Verisign held its quarterly investor call yesterday after announcing another quarter of better-than-usual results.

The company added 2.65 million net additions in .com and .net, above its predicted 1.5 to 2.0 million net adds.

After predicting normalization of registration numbers from China, company executives explained that demand from China was about one million names higher than expected.

Verisign again predicts normalization in Q2 and anticipates between 0.6 million and 1.1 million net adds in the quarter.

One analyst questioned if Verisign might be wrong about this normalization again. The company reiterated that it expects numbers to return to normal this quarter.

The company also warned that it still anticipates that deletions might exceed registrations in Q4, the one year anniversary of 2015’s big gains.

On the Internationalized Domain Name front, the company said it will begin the rollout of Korean transliterations of .com and .net in Q2, and it may release two or three more IDN strings in the second half of the year.

One notable thing not discussed: Verisign’splans to monetize its intellectual property.

It seems the company has either put these plans on the backburner, or it’s being careful not to discuss them much while it works to extend its .com contract.

https://domainnamewire.com/2016/04/29/verisign-2016-idn/

 

[Chris Rice]

This is why Verisign is rolling out .COM IDNs:

Is China Ready to Ditch Typing?
Written by
DANIEL FAGGELLA
May 3, 2016 // 05:00 AM EST



Google may have DeepMind, but Baidu, China's homegrown Google, has Deep Speech.

Deep Speech, which debuted in December 2015, is a speech recognition system that uses an artificial neural network to translate audio input directly to transcribed output. By contrast, most speech recognition systems, including Siri, use multiple, engineer-crafted steps to make translations.

The system has learned how to recognize and transcribe both English and Mandarin, and according to a Baidu paper released in February 2016, it has a recognition rate that is more accurate than most native Mandarin speakers. Baidu announced earlier in April that it will begin rolling out the deep speech technology in collaboration with Peel, a smart remote app that will be available in both English and Mandarin for Android, followed by iOS.

True, Deep Speech hasn't received the same amount of press as Google's champion deep-learning based AlphaGo, but speech recognition technology might forever alter how humans interact with their mobile devices within the next decade—especially for users in China.

While English speakers tend to find typing roman characters relatively fast and easy, typing in Mandarin is typically more time consuming, said Adam Coates, director of Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Labin Sunnyvale, California.

There are over 80,000 Chinese characters, though most contemporary Mandarin speakers use only between 1,000 and 3,500, and each character generally represents one ‘word’ or meaning. To help make typing in Chinese easier, Mandarin speakers use various forms of input editors to type in "pinyin,"the standard system of romanized spelling for transliterating Chinese.

Speech recognition technology might forever alter how humans interact with their mobile devices within the next decade—especially for users in China
In 2015, 89 percent of China's internet-using population was mobile, compared to 75.1 perecent in North America, according to We are Social and Statista respectively. In addition, the ways in which Chinese users interact with their mobile phonesdiffers from most English-speaking users, according to Adweek. Not only do they use more transcription software, but they also stream more videos and engage more often with mobile ads.

“In China because there are a lot of interface challenges, a lot of habits of mobile users are much more sophisticated than in the US, because that’s their main access to internet,” Coates said. For example, Chinese users are accustomed to paying at vending machines with their phones or QR codes, something Coates feels awkward doing.

For this reason, he thinks Chinese users will adopt speech-to-text tools like Deep Speech more rapidly than Americans have adopted tools like Siri or Google Now.

Deep Speech is even able to transcribe “hybrid speech,” a reference to the combination of Mandarin and English speech used by many Mandarin speakers, Coates said. “'IPhone' is a very popular word, and because the system is entirely data-driven it actually learns to do hybrid transcription on its own," Coates said. "It has English and Mandarin characters and it just learns when someone says 'I own an iPhone' and says it in Mandarin, it will actually switch to English and print out 'iPhone' in roman characters.”

In Coates's vision, users in China and elsewhere will use voice to unlock doors, turn on lights, speak to our cars and much more in the near future. It's his lab's goal to get at least 100 million users—and with more than 900 million Mandarin speakers struggling to type on their phones, that may not be as ambitious as it sounds.

motherboard.vice.com/read/baidu-deep-speech

 

[Chris Rice]

Update on China’s New Restrictions on Internet Content

5/4/2016
by
Peter Corne,
Ariel Fu,
Robin Weir
| Dorsey & Whitney LLP
Contact



Apple’s iTunes and Disney’s DisneyLife websites have reportedly become early targets of China’s internet regulators who are beginning to enforce new rules restricting the publication of online content. The new rules, the Online Publishing Service Administrative Rules, were jointly released by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and came into effect in March 2016. Apple and Disney had their websites closed down shortly afterwards in April.

The closures of these high-profile sites offer an early answer to media companies and others who were waiting to see how the rules would translate into reality.

New Approval Requirements

Under the new rules, publishers of online content must obtain an Online Publishing Services License from the SAPPRFT before offering online publishing services in China. In order to obtain this license, applicants need to meet certain requirements. For instance, applicants must maintain a unique domain name, locate their servers in China, and have a legal representative who is a Chinese citizen and a designated “person in charge”, at least one of whom must have obtained a specialist publishing technology qualification recognized by SAPPRFT. The publisher must also have at least eight full-time editing and publishing staff who hold the same level of qualification, although it remains unclear what precise form such qualifications will take.

Prohibition on Foreign Investment

FDI in Online Publishing Sector

These new rules reinforce an existing prohibition on foreign direct investment in the online publishing sector in China. Foreign companies, including wholly foreign-owned enterprises and joint ventures, are prohibited from publishing a wide range of content online, including text, maps, games, audio and video.

Keeping Servers Offshore

The rules apply to any e-publisher with a presence in China, even if they only use servers offshore. Foreign publishers without a China presence that use servers outside the borders of mainland China are beyond the reach of the new rules. But operating a China-focused website from outside the mainland of the People’s Republic presents its own set of problems. The need to cross the “great firewall of China” can result in slow download speeds, difficulty for Chinese customers seeking to make online payments overseas, and the possibility of access to a website being blocked in China entirely.

Impact on VIE Structures

Perhaps the biggest impact of these new rules will be on so-called variable interest entity (VIE) structures. Before these new rules, many foreign companies adopted VIE structures to gain de facto control over Chinese companies providing online publishing services in China, getting around the restrictions on foreign participation in the sector. It appears that these kinds of arrangements will now be difficult and risky to implement. Under the new rules, a Chinese company must submit the details of its cooperation with any foreign-invested company, or offshore entity or individual, to SAPPRFT for examination and approval. The new rules add that online publishing enterprises may not transfer, rent out, or sell their online publishing licenses.

Whether the authorities will now act to close down the hundreds of companies using VIE structures which already exist in China remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that the new rules mark a significant increase in the government’s oversight and regulation of VIE structures in particular, and internet content in general.

Broader Application?

The definition of “internet publishing services” in the new rules is broad enough to catch anyone posting content online. As only entities which obtain an Online Publishing Services Licence may provide “internet publishing services,” it is arguable that no one without such a licence may post any content on line in China. By logical extension, the rules would appear to apply to any knowledge-based business, such as law firms and accountancy firms, that publish content on line. It remains to be seen whether, or when, law firms, accountancy firms and other professional service providers join Disney and Apple in having their China websites taken down.

The rules grant various powers of interpretation to the SAPPRFT. Until clarification is forthcoming, anyone within mainland China posting content on the internet should exercise appropriate caution. Or bite the bullet, apply for an Online Publishing Services Licence, and await a response.

http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/update-on-china-s-new-restrictions-on-52120/

 

[dordomai]

Here are some articles about their efforts to get approved in China. I am guessing that they will get approved in the next 2 to 6 months and that a price surge for .XYZ will follow:
https://gen.xyz/china

Most of these 20 are worthless. It would take more than being an approved extensions to be successful. IMO Chinese .XYZ buyout is already past it's peak. We will likely see huge drops regardless of this approval happening or not.

 

[Chris Rice]

U. S. Government Blasts China's Draft Domain Regulations

• May 16, 2016 9:05 PM

By Philip S. Corwin

In an unexpected move, the two top U.S. officials charged with the Obama Administration's Internet policy have issued a joint statement severely criticizing draft Chinese domain policies. On May 16th, the State Department's Ambassador Daniel A. Sepulveda and NTIA's Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information Lawrence E. Strickling issued an official statement titled "China's Internet Domain Name Measures and the Digital Economy". In it, they charge that "the Chinese government's recent actions run contrary to China's stated commitments toward global Internet governance processes as well as its stated goals for economic reform".

The focus of their ire are new proposed rules issued in March by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The officials describe them as:

draft measures that would require all Internet domain names in China to be registered through government-licensed service providers that have established a domestic presence in the country and would impose additional stringent regulations on the provision of domain name services ...The most controversial provision of China's draft domain name measures — article 37 — has attracted considerable international concern, as some have interpreted the article to mean that all websites with domain names registered outside China will be blocked, thereby cutting off Chinese Internet users from the global Internet.

The statement also throws down the gauntlet in regard to China's recent efforts to push alternative, government-centric models of Internet governance. In this regard, it states:

China's approach to DNS management within its borders could still contravene, undermine, and conflict with current policies for managing top level domains that emerge from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which follows a multistakeholder model in its community-based and consensus-driven policymaking approach.

While probably not affecting the content of the statement, the timing of its issuance may in part be to demonstrate a tough stance toward China's DNS policy in advance of next Tuesday's Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing on the IANA transition and ICANN accountability. Committee member Ted Cruz has been peppering ICANN with questions regarding former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade's participation in China's World Internet Conference (WIC) last December, and his agreement to become Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee to the 2016 WIC meeting. Many speakers at the 2015 WIC meeting defended Internet censorship and heightened government control.

Adding gasoline to the fire, the statement also lashes Chinese Internet censorship, stating in that regard:

The regulations would also appear to formalize an explicit system of online censorship by forbidding the registration of websites containing any one of nine categories of prohibited content, broadly and vaguely defined, and creating a blacklist of "forbidden characters" in the registration of domain names, adding an extra layer of control to China's Great Firewall… What we do not accept is the exercise of aggressive authority over people's use of the Internet or the ability of a government to prevent the world from reaching its people. Sadly, this is exactly what Chinese authorities, through these recent measures, are trying to do.

While such views have likely been advanced in confidential meetings between Chinese and U.S. officials, it is highly unusual to see such bold charges levied against another nation in an official statement.

China has yet to respond to the U.S. allegations, and it remains to be seen if it will moderate its position regarding the draft rules — or whether it will react to this criticism by digging in and implementing them. It is also unclear what effect implementation might have on burgeoning purchases of domain names by Chinese registrants, who have flooded the secondary domain market over the past year through high-dollar purchase of short letter and number domains, and who reportedly also account for more than half the purchases of domains originating from ICANN's new gTLD program. The draft rules could make many registries and domain names off-limits for Chinese purchasers.

The full text of the statement follows —
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20160516_us_government_blasts_chinas_draft_domain_regulations/