Last week, our team heard that China’s MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) would be implementing real name verification system for .COM and .NET domain names, which are owned by Verisign, a non-Chinese domain registry. This would mean that all domain names purchased on .COM or .NET in China would require a Chinese ID or a passport presented to complete registration.
A full analysis of this trend was published today on the industry journal TheDomains.
Our team found that Aliyun Wanwang, a registrar in Beijing and an Alibaba Group company, has not yet implemented these changes. The following screenshots show how this can be done successfully. In our case, we bought the name “realnameverification.com” without having to register a Chinese ID card. Presumably these steps will change within a few days time. Eventually the requirements will be applied to all domain extensions.
Go to aliyun.wanwang.com to try it out.
- Search “realnameverification.com” on Wanwang, the name shows as “still available” (未注册). Then click “add to cart” (加入清单)
- Follow this to the confirm purchase page, where it asks users to choose whether they are an “individual owner of a domain” (个人) or a “corporate owner of a domain” (企业).
- An info button in the menu on the right (highlighted in red) tells the user how to choose between “individual” and “corporate”.
When hovering the mouse over the button the following information shows up: “Choosing an individual or corporate user will not affect the use of the domain name. There are only different real name verification application materials that need to be submitted only when registering domestic TLDs such as .CN. If one cannot provide his/her corporate credentials for now, we recommend choosing “individual owner of the domain” for now. One can make changes in the membership center later. (Note: .gov.cn cannot have individual owners as registrants. Also, real name verification materials need to be submitted and approved within 5 days of registration, otherwise the registration will not succeed). For “individual owners of the domain”, you will need to fill out personal information (including a Chinese ID number and scanned copy of your ID for real name verification of domestic TLDs such as .CN). For “corporate owners of the domain”, you need to fill out corporate information (including a corporate license number or organization number and scanned copies of the documents for real name verification of domestic TLDs such as .CN).”
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When choosing “individual owner”, users need to create a template (since this is the first purchase, we have not yet filled out personal information).
- After clicking “create template”, you will be taken to this page. On the top right there’s a “create template” button.
You must then fill out personal information and click “save”. One thing to note is that the address must match the one that’s linked to the user’s phone number (SIM cards are purchased with an ID so that would be the address on the ID used to purchase the SIM card).
Here it says that the user’s information is not yet verified.
The user then needs to fill out their ID number and upload the front of the ID card. (We haven’t completed this step for the purpose of seeing whether we can get a .com without being verified).
This takes us back to the shopping cart payment page. After choosing the template just created, which is still under “unverified” status, one can then click on the “pay now” button.
It then goes to the payment page.
After a successful transaction, the name is bought without real name verification.
When we look up the name, it says “international TLDs are still in the process of collecting data, and whether it is verified will not affect the registration and use of the domain.”