With Markmonitor China Registrar Services, you can simplify your domain management and choose to host specific parts of your domain portfolio in mainland China, providing you with complete control and flexibility. Due to the complexity of MIIT regulations and policies, we invite you to watch this webinar, which discusses how registries, especially Brand Registries, can operate in compliance with local requirements.

In this webinar, Heidi Zhang, Head of Markmonitor China, hosts industry experts Sophia Feng, Deputy General Manager of ZDNS, and Frank Wang, Regional Sales Executive at CentralNic, to share insights and guidance.

Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

 Webinar Transcript: Learn How Brand Registries Operate in China

Speaking: Heidi Zhang, Head of Markmonitor China Registrar

Thank you, everyone. Welcome to the webinar! We’re very happy to be here today with our guest speakers from ZDNS and CentralNic to talk about how Brand Registries operate in China.  So, let me introduce the speakers today.

I’m Heidi Zhang from Markmonitor. I’m the head of Markmonitor China Registrar, and I’m also in charge of our APAC industry relationships. We also have Sophia Feng from ZDNS. She’s the Deputy General Manager, and she’s a veteran in the domain industry. She has a lot of experience in New gTLDs and registries, registrars, and also ZDNS is a backend service provider. And we have with us Frank Wang from CentralNic. He’s a regional sales executive.  He has a background with CNNIC and has also been in this industry for a very long time.

Webinar Agenda

We’re very happy to have them with us today to hear their thoughts, insights, and ideas about the brand registry operation in China.  Today, we’re going to go through the registry operation licenses in China and very high-level guidelines for the MIT application. For more detailed information on MIIT guidelines, please see our previous webinar, “Learn How Markmonitor China Registrar Can Help Your Global Business.” Then, we will hear from CentralNic and ZDNS about their experiences, their registry operations, the market for brands in China, how they help their clients bring their brands to China, and how they run their businesses. We’re also going to talk about foreign registries and how they can operate and offer domain registrations in China.

MIIT License Overview and Regulations for Brand Registries in China

Let’s discuss the MIIT license overview from 2017 when China published new internet domain regulations. As of 2017, MIIT has had a very clear requirement — registries and registrars, if they want to run businesses in China,  need to have their MIIT license, they need to go through MIIT and apply for the license. Right now, there are altogether 159 licensed TLDs in China, including New gTLDs, ccTLDs, and legacy TLDs. And of all of them, 118 of them are TLD registries from outside of China and eight of them are .brand TLDs.

Now, I want to share a little bit more about the registry and brand registry. When we say registry, we mean New gTLD registries, ccTLD registries, and legacy TLD registries. And for brand registries, we mean the registries that operate their own brand names at the top-level. In the new internet domain regulations, no matter if it’s a legacy TLD, New gTLD, or .brand TLD, if you want to offer domain names in China, then you have to go to MIIT for your license. That is the very same requirement for all registries. Here, I have outlined the guidelines, very high-level guidelines to show how MIIT will review the applications and what is the most important in the application.

So, you can see from the screen right now that MIIT will look into three aspects: business level, technical level, and operational level. All in all, MIIT just wants to make sure that the registry has a very clear plan of what it is going to do with the business and with the registrations. They want to make sure that the registry is very clear about where it is going, what their plan is if anything were to happen and learn about their investment in their technical system and daily operations.

You can see that at the business level, MIIT requires the registry to have a local entity — that means a local company founded in China to support the daily operation. They require that the registry has a very clear business plan for one, three, and five years. They want to know that the registry is very serious about the business and has a very clear path for their business.  Then there’s the technical part. It is the strictest because the registry has to have its system deployed in mainland China. And all of the data, especially the personal data like registrants’ data, needs to stay in mainland China. All registries have to do real name verification for all of their registrations, and at the operational level, the registry needs to have a very dedicated team committed to the daily operation, including a primary contact, technical contact, and administration contact. Registries also need to provide a bunch of policy documents, including the registration requirements, abuse policies, compliance policies, et cetera.

I will now hand over to Frank Wang from CentralNic to hear their thoughts and stories.

CentralNic’s Brand Registry Experience in China

Speaking: Frank Wang, Regional Sales Executive, CentralNic

Thank you very much, Heidi.

Hi, everybody. Wherever you’re joining us from — good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. I want to introduce myself. My name is Frank Wang. I live and work in mainland China. I’m mainly responsible for all the registry and registrar business activities in China’s market. Secondly, I want to thank Markmonitor for providing me with this opportunity to share some of my experience in China’s market. CentralNic is a registry backend provider.  So without further ado, let’s start.

This is the mission statement of the CentralNic Registry, “to run the world’s best domain registry platform, which helps its registry clients successfully operate and market their TLDs, help registrars to easily and efficiently register and manage their domain names, with a relentless focus on technical excellence, flexibility, and a close working relationship with key stakeholders.”  As CentralNic Registry, we are the leading company providing registry backend services. We act as a bridge between registry and registrar clients. We’re using our technology know how to provide automatic registry platforms for stable, reliable, and secure systems to fit all kinds of TLDs.

What I mean by all kinds of TLDs, as you can see, is that there are different registries that have different purposes and different functionalities. For example, our top New gTLD registry clients are XYZ registry, RADIX, Shortdot, Intercap, and ZDNS. There are also some single TLD registries, such as .Art Registry. There are some TLDs that are open to the general public, who register their TDS all over the world, but the second category will be the top .Brand Registry clients, for example, in our in our platform, we have .smart, .bmw,  .dhl,  .lidl, and .mini, etc. Those brand registries are mainly big corporations, and those TLDs are not open to the public. Those companies use their TLDs for various purposes, mainly to protect their online brand image and to invest in them as digital assets.

You can see in the bottom there’s the third category of TLDs, those are the ccTLDs. Those two letters, the ccTLDs, are TLDs representing different countries. For example, .am is Armenia, .bh is Burkina Faso, and .gl is Greenland. The last example is in Arabic. That means it’s an IDN TLD or Internationalized Domain Name.  If your company wants to apply for IDN TLDs in the second round of New gTLDs that are opening, say, in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or other different language characters, CentralNic can support them all.

As you can see from the right-hand side in the pie chart, that is up-to-date as of last Friday, November 1st, 2024, and it indicates that the CentralNic registry has 46.8% of the market share for all registry backend providers.

Why should you choose to use CentralNic Registry? As you can imagine, what you can see is what you get. We are the leading registry service provider. Our registry and registrar partners are the big players in the domain industry. We have over 28 years of experience in the market. For the last 10 years, we built our own registry systems with multiple industry certificates like ISO and IPv6, and we have information security, quality, business continuity, and business management certificates.  We work with AWS to offer APIs for connection and web interfaces all over the world.

We also offer a registry console, a secure, web-based portal providing real-time assets for registration data for both registries and registrars. We offer a key account manager for all registries. Whenever you have any issues, you can find the right person directly and in a timely fashion to help you solve those problems.

What are the benefits if you apply for .Brand TLDs in the next round of the New gTLD Program?  It will be mainly in helping you to protect your brand image from competitors and counterfeiters online. It can help your brand to differentiate from your competitors. You can also build your new online marketing strategy around your new .Brand TLDs.

You can apply for new trademarks for each .brand TLD. And .Brand TLDs provide more direct approaches from a customer’s point of view with online marketing traffic. If your .Brand TLD is an IDN extension, it will also be easier for your target audience to find you online. It speeds up your localization process to target the right country’s audience. 

Before you take any action, there are three points that you should keep in mind. The first one is the cost. The application fee for ICANN’s Next Round is 227,000 US dollars. That only covers the application itself; it does not include the yearly fee, which has not been announced yet. So, a wild guess from myself, I think it will be around 4,000 US dollars per year.

Once you become an operator for a .Brand TLD, you’ll also need your own registry backend systems, a backend provider — it’s a must. They are also called registry service providers, or RSP, like CentralNic Registry, and ZDNS — we’re all capable of helping you, and we all have the certificates to act as an RSP in the Next Round. Our fees are not fixed. So, the cost depends on an individual business’s application for TLDs. If you are interested, please contact us after the webinar. A third-party escrow provider is also mandatory. The cost would be between 4,000 to 6,000 US dollars per year. And if you want to establish a company in China, there will also be a cost to do that. For that, you have two options. The first one is you invest as a wholly owned company, and you can run the registry in China — you have to apply for the MIIT license. And after that, you have to work with local registries, registrars, and also the local data export providers. And the second option is that you grant all the TLDs, let’s say, licenses, to a local company in China.

Because that is business dependent — different situations and different TLDs — the cost may be different. Also, ICANN requests a base level of abuse monitoring. Even if you operate a .Brand TLD in a closed namespace, you need to be aware of ICANN’s application requirements because those also have to be monitored for abuse. 

Regarding timing, there are a few things that you have to keep in mind. The first one is the release of the applicant guidebook. That will occur around May of next year, 2025. Once the guidebook has been published, we can all follow the requirements to prepare all the things ICANN needs and asks for. And then, there is the application submission date, which has been scheduled for the second quarter of 2026. The estimated open window will be six months.  And the last thing will be budgeting for your .Brand TLD — because the application window will be in 2026, next year will be good timing to set up your budget.

I suggest that when you make your budget, increase your number by 20 percent just in case you overspend your estimate.  There are partners for companies or registries that want to outsource all their application processes, and there are consulting companies that can help you to do that. Markmonitor, CentralNic Registry, and ZDNS are all capable of these services. And for your RSP, like I said, CentralNic and ZDNS can help. If you are looking for a data escrow provider, there are international companies that can help provide these services. You can also get assistance complilance consulting services, there are services in the market for that.

Now, let’s look at the market in China and some facts about that. Why choose to apply for a .Brand TLD in China? Why should you want to enter the Chinese market? I’ll talk about this in four dimensions: population, internet infrastructure, technology, and economy.

The first one will be the population. China’s population is 1.4 billion people, with 1.1 billion internet users. That’s almost 98% percent of the population. 97.2% percent of Chinese kids (17 and under) are using the internet every day. This is the generation that was born with iPhones for toys, and using the internet is in their blood. 

Since Huawei released this technology, there have been many 5G network stations for the Internet and infrastructure. In China, we have built 3 3 million 5G network stations to empower the user experience, and China has spent a lot of effort building green energies, such as windmills, wind and water power stations, and solar power stations.

On the technology side, I want to talk about 6G, a new technology developed by satellite communication companies. Everyone knows of Starlink — they’re using satellites as an intermediary to make phone calls anywhere in the world, and they provide internet access. In China, we have the same technology that’s released by the government.

The last one will be the economy. China’s total economic growth last year was 5.2%. China is the second largest economy in the world after the United States of America, and every year, we see growth of around 5%, which we’re on track to exceed this year. China is a big market for all kinds of businesses. And that will be the end of my presentation.

Speaking: Heidi Zhang

Thank you, Frank. We know CentralNic plays a very important role in this sector. Thank you for sharing very detailed information about the Next Round and also the domain market potentials in China. We see the data, the numbers — it’s very exciting — and a big reason as to why so many registries want to come to China to get their license. In China we have a big number of active internet users, so that is a driving factor for .Brand TLDs registries who want to come to China.

Next, let’s welcome Sophia Feng to share her experience. ZDNS has multiple roles in the sector, and they have helped a lot of registries and .Brand registries to get their licenses.

ZDNS’s Brand Registry Experience in China

Speaking: Sophia Feng, Deputy General Manager, ZDNS

Hi everyone, this is Sophia Feng, the Deputy General Manager from ZDNS. I started working in the domain industry in 2012. I’m in charge of the domain name registry business sectors at ZDNS. I actively participated in the first round of the New gTLD Application Program and have helped many .brand registries obtain their TLD accreditation that have been in operation since then, so for more than 10 years now.

Today, I’m very happy to share ZDNS’s experience helping domestic and international TLDs enter and operate in the Chinese market. Thank you, Markmonitor, for this great opportunity.

A brief introduction about ZDNS: the full name for ZDNS is “Internet Domain Name System Engineering Research Center, LTD.” ZDNS is a high-tech company incubated by the Chinese Academy of Science.  Our founders, the members of our founding team, are originally from the .cn registry operator, CNNIC.

We have more than 20 years of experience in the registry operator business. So we were founded in 2013, and for the past 10 years, we have developed our registry service to help operate TLDs successfully. We are also a brand registrar, helping a lot of big corporations to manage their domain portfolio, and we also ran two TLDs ourselves. Our mother company operates Chinese IDN TLDs. So, as you can see, we are fully participating in the whole domain name ecology and industry, and we provide up-to-date services for our clients so we can meet all their needs.

Heidi has mentioned MIIT requirements at a very high level. First of all, we need a business plan. I think this is quite clear. And secondly, with the technical deployment. I would like to elaborate a little bit more on that. So, technical deployment is a very crucial requirement for MIIT accreditation. For the cyber security requirements and also the data protection requirements in mainland China — for the technical deployment, we need to make sure all the registration data and real notification data are stored and transacted in mainland China in accordance with MIIT policy requirements.

Since MIIT’s compliance requirements were introduced, and in order to meet ICANN’s technical requirements, ZDNS has built our technical solution to meet both requirements and help their clients meet them as well. Basically, if you are an entity in China that wants to operate a TLD —  most Chinese entities will choose a local backend registry operator (BERO),  like ZDNS. We fully operate in China and we’re also able to provide service globally with our customer support. If you are an entity that operates outside of China, then you already have a global backend registry operator. With our technical solution, ZDNS will work together with your global BERO to build up integrations to be able to meet the requirements and have both BEROs store the equivalent data. We call this solution a dual registry backend solution. With this solution, all the Chinese registrars will integrate with the ZDNS platform, and the ZDNS platform will integrate with a global backend.  In this way, we’ll be able to register domains in compliance and be able to use the domains with the MIIT ICP licensing — that means that is a legal website, able to be built within the China region and also all that Chinese internet users be able to access to the website(s). So basically, this is the general high-level description of how this deal between backend registry operators works.

As Heidi mentioned, you first need to have a Chinese entity. And with our experience with .Brand TLDs, most companies probably already have subsidiaries and entities already set up in mainland China. So, you need to make sure that you can and will fully cooperate with this local entity and have the staff able to help assist with the application program to go through the process smoothly. And with generic TLD operators, our experience is that they first need to figure out whether they want to establish and set up wholly owned subsidiaries within China and have a person dedicated to business developments in China. Once you have the entity set up, what we do is help you go through the license application program. We provide a technical backend and a run of verification services to be able to meet the needs for the technical deployment.

Once we obtain the MIIT licensing, it will need to be renewed every five years. After the applications, and also during the operation, there are some compliance items that need to be met. There are random compliance inspections conducted by MIIT bureaus, so ZDNS provides continuous compliance consultations. Generally speaking, ZDNS will take care of all the compliance items and issues that deal with MIIT licensing, and registries just need to work with us to provide any necessary documentation. We want to make these processes as simple and smooth as possible for registry clients who want to enter China.

Next slide please — this is a high-level overview of the MIIT license application process. As you can see, a lot of details in the process are actually very streamlined and yet it’s a little complicated process as well. You can compare it to a mini-ICANN application process, but maybe less work. At the moment, the estimated time for a registry to obtain their MIIT license after submitting all materials is approximately six to nine months (depending on some Chinese holidays, that time might extend a little bit more.)

ZDNS has already helped 60 TLDs obtain their MIIT licensing to operate in China, including 10 .Brand TLDs — most of them are Chinese brands but also some international brands like J.P. Morgan and Dutch Chase — and we’ve helped three ccTLDs and 47 New gTLDs. Those TLDs mostly want to conduct business in China and attract as many registrations as possible. All these clients that we’ve helped already have 5.29 million domains on the second-level domain under management in our platform. Our platform has been in operation for more than 12 years and has been working very smoothly. We hope that in the near future, we’ll be able to have more TLDs in our platform as the Next Round approaches. 

I also want to share our experience helping a key brand that’s attending to all the accreditation requirements to be able to operate successfully in China. So, Citigroup is a multinational corporation investing in many areas; they’re very big in finance and construction and also cultural investments — they have more than 1000 subsidiaries. In 2012, they decided to apply for their TLDs, and in 2013, shortly after they got their ICANN application approved, we helped them obtain their MIIT licensing, which, after six months, they got approved.

That’s why, in 2014, they they started to use group.citi for their official websites. They are the first company to replace their main .com site with their .brand, and it was quite significant at that time. Since then, they have had a very unified online brands appearance. They have been actively using their TLD domains, and at the moment, they have 320 domains under management used by more than 100 subsidiaries for sales and marketing, promotion of business, media communication, customer maintenance, et cetera. You can see that they’re very creative on how to stay very united with the name they are using.

After 10 years, Citigroup has valued their TLDs as digital brand assets, not only for appearance. And Citigroup brand sites also get a certificate to demonstrate that they’re actually part of Citigroup. I think they use their .brand TLDs as a management mechanism and also to manage their online brand appearances in a unified way. Now, with this kind of mechanism and this systematic usage, they prove they have the right protections for Citigroup brands. Previously, before they used their .brand TLDs, it was more difficult to prove some malicious abuse domains were not related to Citigroup.

But now, they have built up this TLD in a very systematic and unified way. So, I think they made a five-year and a 10-year plan, and a 15-year plan to actually build up their digital brands and entity with continuous effort. For the next five years, what they are going to do is they can also give up some of those other domains in management, those that are not their brand TLD. I think that’s a very big step. But with the efforts to build their own TLD, I think eventually, it’s very cost-saving and makes sense for them to do.

I think that’s all for my sharing for today. Thank you.

The Challenge Brand Registries Operating in China Face

Speaking: Heidi Zhang

Thank you, Sophia. Thank you for sharing with us about the dual backend registry platform model, which has helped many registries come to China and get their licenses. Also, thank you very much for sharing the .citi case study. That is very helpful and enlightening.

So, we have the last topic. It’s about the challenge of brand registries operating in China. Even though brand registries must have their license in hand before they can offer .Brand registrations, there is still something they need to do before launch. For example, finding the right partner to work with. We can call that the brand registrar.

For brand registrars, we have retail registrars and corporate domain registrars. The former is driven by registration volume. They will likely not want to work with a .Brand TLD because the registration volume is very low and specific to the brand’s use cases. Also, brand registries may have many different registration policies, requirements, and ways of paying.

So, that is going to be a challenge for .Brand TLDs. I want to ask Sophia, when it comes to .Brand TLDs, what should they do to find the appropriate brand registrar, and how do they work together?

Speaking: Sophia Feng

Sure. So, I just want to make one thing clear regarding ICANN policies: if you are a brand registrar and sign Specification 13 for the registry agreement, you are qualified to use only one registrar to register your domains. That makes total sense for the brand because they don’t want to have 10 or 20 registrars opening their TLDs to internet users. So, for example, what Citigroup did is choose ZDNS as their registrar just to be compliant with ICANN and ICANN rules. Everybody should understand that the ICANN rule is that you need to have a registrar to be able to register domains.

If you are a registry, you cannot distribute more than 100 domains by the registry itself. I think in this sense that Markmonitor can help, it is a registrar and CentralNic and ZDNS are as well. You only need one registrar to meet the ICANN requirement.

Speaking: Heidi Zhang

YThank you. I also want to add that if a brand registry only works with one registrar to offer your brand domain names in China, then you need to work with a Chinese registrar because it’s very important to work with an MIIT-licensed registrar. 

Is there anything else you want to add, Frank?

Speaking: Frank Wang

From my side, because CentralNic Registry is not an entity in the Chinese market, we cannot offer those services in China. Outside China, we do have this kind of license. If you want to enter the Chinese market, the best partner you are looking for is Markmonitor.

Speaking: Heidi Zhang

Thank you very much. Thank you, Frank. Thank you, Sophia.

That is all for today’s webinar. Take care, everyone. Thank you all for joining us.