We published a post earlier this morning about the TLD Registry Ltd, and its two new Chinese IDN new gTLD’s  Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网).

We interviewed  A representative of the registry who predicted that they was a greater than 50% chance that both of these extensions would be in the top 5 of all new gTLD’s after its Landrush completed and now the registry announced overnight that it has contracted with the Chinese central government’s own registrar in a deal for 10,226 domain names in each of our new Chinese TLDs, Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网).

The Service Development Center of SCOPSR is the government’s own registrar, and as a division of SCOPSR (the State Council Office for Public Sector Reform) is responsible for providing all domain names to all Chinese government organizations.

The parent organization, SCOPSR, was founded in 1949 and is responsible for the naming of all parts of China.

As an Office of the State Council, SCOPSR is a full ministerial level organization, and China’s Prime Minister, Li Keqiang serves as SCOPSR’s Chairman. Make no mistake, the SDC of SCOPSR is extremely important in China’s national governance.

The domain names sold by TLD Registry to the SDC of SCOPSR include the names of every city in China with populations of >200,000 people, all ~3000 counties, all provinces, all municipalities, all Special Administrative Regions, and a number of key locations such as mountains. Not only are the names of the places registered as domain names in Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网), but names such as “Invest in [Place]”, “[Place] Tourism”, “[Place] Information” and “Place [Transportation]” have been registered.

TLD Registry is the only registry which the SDC of SCOPSR has contracted with, and Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) are the only non-government TLDs which it has registered domain names in. This is because our TLDs have been identified by the SDC of SCOPSR leadership as the best of the new Chinese TLDs, and that they fill an important role in China’s new IDN policy and e-government initiatives. The policy I refer to was jointly introduced by SCOPSR and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on March 3rd this year — it *requires* all Chinese government websites to transition to fully-Chinese domain names.

You can think of China’s goverment as the principal foundation partner for our two Chinese TLDs.

As you can imagine, we are very happy with our deal with SDC of SCOPSR. Talks with the organization began almost 7 months ago, and were assisted by the Finnish prime minister and Finpro, the Finnish export development authority. The deal was negotiated by TLD Registry’s China Strike Team (Arto Isokoski (CEO), Pinky Brand (VP Partners) and myself (CMO and head of China strategy).

Our back-end provider, Afilias, has already added the names to our zonefiles, and the names will appear in WHOIS from the first moment of our Landrush, which begins tomorrow (Thursday 20 March).”

Once again there is a live auction on Thursday night 11pm EST (live in Macau Friday Morning at 11am local time) of 39 lots of premium domain names and online bidding will be allowed through Sedo  if you want to bid in the auction you will have to  request certification, in advance.

Please send an email to  MacauAuction@sedo.com with your login name and copy info@rightofthedot.com on the email and we will make sure the Registry gets your request