China now has 21.24 million .cn domain names

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) says the number of China's top-level domains using .cn stood at 21.24 million at the end of last year, down 1.4 percent from the previous year.

The fall in the number of Chinese domain names is a sign that the industry is developing rationally, said Hu Anlei, the assistant to the head of the CNNIC. He added that the security of China's domain name management is improving.

[File photo: IC]

At the end of 2018, 349 million top-level domain names were registered around the world. There were also 154 million national-level domain names registered, according to data released by the CNNIC at the 2019 China Internet Infrastructure Resources Conference. The agency said there were 1.72 million domain names using the Chinese characters "中国", which means China.

The internet resources conference was hosted by the CNNIC under the guidance of the Cyberspace Administration of China. Nearly 1,000 experts, scholars, entrepreneurs, and industry representatives took part.

China was officially connected to the Internet in 1994. It's home to the world's largest number of Internet users.

(Story includes material sourced from Xinhua.)