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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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recognition within the Internet community and his good personal contacts with Internet pioneers
in the United States, who also became excited about the challenge of helping Chinese academics
open the door to the West.
After a series of individual efforts on various levels, the name server of the Chinese country-code
top-level domain .cn was finally successfully linked to the Internet root server system. Zorn helped
- in cooperation with Stephen S. Wolff of the US National Science Foundation and Lawrence H.
Landweber, co-founder of the US Computer Science Network (which connected many countries to
the Internet in the 1980s) - to introduce the .cn root zone file into the data base of the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority and to get final approval by the US government to authorize
publication of the .cn root zone file in the A-root server in 1990.
The two-letter code .cn was listed on the ISO 3166 list, 6 a geographic coding standard published
by the International Organization for Standardization. From the early 1980s, the ISO list was used
by Internet pioneer Jon Postel, of the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern
California in Marina del Rey, as a data base for the delegation of the management of country-code
top-level domains. Postel also managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority data base and
the global Domain Name System from its creation in the early 1980s.
Then, delegation of a country-code top-level domain was done mainly with a handshake and
without great formalities, to a trusted manager with Jon Postel's personal confidence. Government
authorities were not involved. Nevertheless, authorization for publication of a top-level domain
root zone file in the A-root server needed confirmation by the US National Science Foundation,
which funded Internet development in the US from the mid-1980s. It also required authorization
by the US Department of Commerce.
Postel delegated management of the .cn to Zorn. When he returned to Karlsruhe in 1988, he
continued to manage the .cn domain. A copy of the relevant data base of the .cn name server
remained in Bejing, but the domain’s day-to-day management was in Zorn's hands.
CNNIC: From 10,000 to 10 million registered domain names
In 1994, management of the .cn domain was handed over to the Chinese Academic Network, a
subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Three years later, in 1997, the Chinese Internet
Network Information Center (CNNIC) was established and took over full responsibility for
management of the .cn domain.
Fewer than 10,000 Internet domain names were then registered under .cn. This number grew at a
marginal growth rate, to 50,000 by 2001 and to 430,000 in 2004. The explosion started in 2005,
when the number of registered domain names crossed the 1 million mark. By the end of 2006,
there were 1.8 million domain names registered, by mid-2007,
6 million and by the end of 2007, 9 million. 7 With this number, the .cn registry had
become the world's second largest country code top-level domain after DENIC, the central registry
for all domains under the top level domain .de., with 11.8 million registered domain names.
The China Internet Network Information Center is the main Internet body in China. It is a
government agency but was founded as a non-profit organization under Chinese law on June 3,
1997. It takes its orders from the Ministry of Information Industry for its daily business, while it is
administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A steering committee, a working group of wellknown
experts and commercial representatives from the domestic Internet community, supervises
and evaluates the structure, operation and administration of the center.