Chinaâs ccTLD has become the second largest by registration numbers and âmost usedâ according to a report by the Chinese newsagency Xinhua.
There are now 16.36 million .cn domain names registered compared to 16.02 million .de (Germany) domains. The largest, .tk (Tokelau) has around 27.46 million domains registered, but these are by and large given away for free and there is very low usage. Has anyone seen a .tk domain out in the wild? It is also one of the five TLDs with the most phishing domains according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group [pdf].
The .cn ccTLD has been growing rapidly in recent years following a tightening up of registration rules. Registrations reached 16.82 million at the end of 2009, dropped to under 8 million in 2011 and since then have steadily increased.
In June 2015, according to CNNIC statistics [pdf], there were 22.31 million domain names registered in China, 12.25 million of these being .cn domains. The vast majority of the non-.cn domains were .com domains â 8.42 million. Of the .cn domains, three quarters (76.0% or 9.31m) were registered at the second level and 1.72 million (14.0%) were registered under .com.cn.