Assistant Director of CNNIC Qi Lin told sina.com.cn that China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has begun work on a personal domain name registration scheme and revising relevant issues of Domain Name Registration Regulations at present. The authenticity of domain name owners will lay the foundations for opening domain name registration to individuals.

According to regulations, since 2002 applicants eligible for China's domain name ".CN" were limited to organizations which were "legally registered and capable of taking civil liability." Individuals could only apply for registration through agencies otherwise their applications were not deemed valid.

Qi Lin said that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology allowed people to create their own websites and apply filing. "As an indispensable part of a website, domain names should also open to personal applicants," Qi said.

On December 11 last year, CNNIC issued a notice about strengthening the examination of registered domain names' information. This was translated to "prohibiting personal domain name registration." Analysts said if individuals could not register domain names in China, they would turn to foreign countries or hand in fake companies' information. "It's better to allow personal registration as soon as possible to stop driving people outside China. Deleting or temporarily stopping resolving domain names will do harm to the legal rights of internet users, internet administration and real-name system," Qi Lin pointed out.

In a notice issued last Friday, CNNIC said they would begin to examine the authenticity of registered individual owners' information. Qi Lin told sina.com.cn in a phone interview that the domain names with authentic, precise and complete information would be protected, whether they belonged to individuals or organizations. It means eligible individuals could keep domain names with ".CN", though whether new individual applicants would be acceptable was unknown yet.

The examination will last until January 31. If the information is still not qualified after the deadline and individual domain owners don't hand in materials in time, the domains will not be resolved until all the necessary materials are complete.

CNNIC will delete domains which violate articles of China Internet Domain Name Administration Regulation.

Ministry of Public Security and General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine have opened the ID card and organization code enquiry systems respectively to CNNIC for the individual registration information examination. The latest CNNIC's report shows that there are 16.81 million domains in China and 80 percent of them end with ".CN".