Today, in a Congressional testimony, senior executives from GoDaddy.com announced they would stop registering domain names in China, effectively ceasing their entire business operations in the country. This isn’t due to just riding on Google’s happy internet freedom bandwagon either; GoDaddy was recently handed new regulations to follow by the Chinese government meant to create clearly identifiable profiles of people registering domains by the service.

In December, China began to enforce a new policy that required any registrant of a new .cn domain name to provide a color, head-and-shoulders photograph and other business identification, including a Chinese business registration number and physical, signed registration forms. That data was to be forwarded to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a quasi-governmental agency. Most domain name registries require only a name, address, telephone number and e-mail address.

It would take more time and effort than is profitable to build and maintain such a database of information– this isn’t just a moral decision, it’s a business one as well.

We can talk about China until we’re blue in the face, what with its rising economic power, its willingness to throw that weight around and the fallout it’s caused. Where it’s especially hit the news is in the Internet though. The Google-China dispute that now has Google officially shutting down the google.cn servers is a prime example of this: huge news from a country that at the conception of the Internet wasn’t even foreseen to be a factor. The fact of the matter is though is that this increasing clampdown of information in the country can’t possibly be good for trade, indeed, for business at all in the country. Even if the Chinese government COULD censor everything in the country, that would mean a lot of important documents and information could be blacklisted and blocked possibly for including or being associated to seditious remarks. There’s no way they could filter everything and come away with the most useful information left.

See original article here.