As often happens when new rules are released in China, media outlets scramble to interpret the often opaque wording of draft legal changes that could potentially impact the market regulatory environment. This is not without good intention, and it important to keep up with fast-changing market conditions in China.
However, it is sometimes necessary to provide extra context. Last week a number of mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, interpreted new draft rules from China’s Internet regulator MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) in somewhat alarmist terms. They indicated that China was potentially shutting out any foreign websites from resolving in China.
Though this interpretation understandable, more than a decade of regulatory context needed to be included. Allegravita and its partners at ZDNS set the record straight last week in our editorial pieces on CircleID, indicating that China’s new rules on Internet domains do not interfere in overseas enterprises and overseas websites resolving in China.
The new regulations from March 25th simply update regulations from more than a decade ago (2004), indicating that websites hosted in China must be run on domain names approved, registered and operating in China. The MIIT released its own clarification in a statement a few days later on March 28th.
There has actually been very little change in the wording or functioning of MIIT regulations since 2004, except in describing how they are to be implemented. Our editorial describing this was picked up on Bill Bishop’s Sinocism Newsletter this morning, a community standard for China watchers and expats. See more details below: