Trade mark owners already established in China and those hoping
to enter the Chinese market will face another threat to their
online rights from March 17. That is when the registration of
.cn second level domain names becomes open to the
public.
The new regime is complicated by the liberalization of other
rules relating to the system. The most important of these changes
is that from December 1 2002 registrants of .com.cn,
.net.cn, or org.cn domain names, that is,
third-level domain names, can come from anywhere in the world.
Previously they had to have a local presence or a local server.
The China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), which
administers China's domain name registry, declared second level
.cn domain names open in December 2002. The policy set up
a priority period from January 6 2003 to February 28 2003 to allow
owners of third level .cn domain names and owners of
well-known trade marks to apply for the corresponding second level
.cn domain names. Second level .cn domains refer
to a domain name followed by the .cn suffix rather than a
domain name followed by, for example, .com or
.net followed by the .cn ending.
"This liberalization could also signal a rapid increase in
domain name registration by unrelated third parties looking to
trade off the goodwill of established companies and their
respective trade marks, already an issue in the physical world of
counterfeiting in China," said Gabriela Kennedy and David Taylor,
of Lovells's technology, media and telecommunications group.
International trade mark owners, such as Ikea and Procter &
Gamble, had to deal with the registration of their trade marks as
domain names in China when .cn domain names first came on
to the market in 1997 and were only able to recover them after
court action.
Other changes to the domain name system in China mean that CNNIC
no longer sells directly to end users. Instead it has accredited 23
registrars, comprising 21 on the mainland and one each from Hong
Kong and the US, to sell domain names and provide other domain name
services.
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