China bans individuals from registering domain names

How ironic is that? A country that was supposed to have been founded on (Mao's interpretation of) Marxist principles, giving power to the people over the capitalist extremes, will now refuse Internet domain to those people; <i>only</i> businesses, those tools of capitalism, get this privilege.

Up to until a few years ago .fi domains could only be registered by a company or other organization matching the name of the domain.<p>I sort of liked that system. There were almost no vanity/"spam" domains in the TLD.

Another example where powers-that-have been are trying to stop inevitable future with restrictions and fines. The way it's done is noteworthy also: instead of targeting pornography on personal sites in particular they have banned any one person from having a personal site at all* . This is akin to chasing flies with a baseball bat.<p>*At lest independent sites that are not created through some service, a la Blogger, and which it would be labor-intense for the government to police one by one.<p>Edit: err, now I know how to italicize in HN

I don't think this changes much. You've always needed a government license to run a server, so virtually everybody either already had government permission or was running their stuff out of Hong Kong.<p>This the new ban looks more like they're making sure that everybody with a .cn is "in the system". You can still start a website, you just need to go through one of the approved vendors for a domain name.<p>I'm not in China any more, so jhancock or some of the other China guys can probably tell you more.

Hope this will be one of those rules that is never really going to be implemented/enforced, but if some websites are really already unavailable, that doesn't bode well...

Meanwhile Godaddy opens Alipay (most popular one in China, kinda like Paypal) for the convenience of the Chinese.

I didn't expect that something like this could ever happen... ok,it's China, but still unbelievable.

How difficult / expensive is it to set up a company in China?

This is a very misleading article. The restriction is only on .CN domain names and is in line with plenty of other domain types around the world, for example .co.jp.<p>Here's the original source:<p><a href="http://business.globaltimes.cn/china-economy/2009-12/491515.html" rel="nofollow">http://business.globaltimes.cn/china-economy/2009-12/491515....</a>

In a sense, this is good for the US economy, because it means that China is out of the game in terms of entrepreneurial activities on the web.