As reported last month, the Chinese Government approved .XYZ, .CLUB and .VIP domain names to be hosted in China. Following the approval, .SHOP and .SITE are two new gTLDs that have been added to the list of approved gTLDs.
The approval from Chinese government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) means that these extensions can now apply for local licenses to be hosted within China. Prior to the approval of these new gTLDs, only .COM and .NET operated by Verisign were officially approved by MIIT.
According to namestat.org, Chinese registrants make up the largest group of registrants by country for .SITE with 83% of registrations coming from China while for .SHOP, it is 9% of registrations, the 4th largest.
The new gTLDs are expected to gain a huge boost from the Chinese market as the terms “shop” and “site” are widely understood in China. Radix, the operating Registry for .SITE announced that they will launch in China by early January. The Chinese government can however order domain names and hosted websites that it does not approve of, to be deleted.