During the 2008 Beijing Olympics Chinas sport authorities have decided to ban domain names related to any of their gold medal winning competitors. The Domains them self are to be issued to the respective medalist winners themselves free of charge so they can build their own sites on them.
An official of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has stated that the move to ban the registering of these domains is to protect the better interests of their Olympic gold medalists, following the problems surrounding the commercial use of athlete’s names after Athens 2004.
Before the games opened the available domains were registered in Chinese characters as well as pinyin by the CNNIC to guarantee the domains will go to the medalists, anyone registering domains relating to the medalists before this have been advised by the CNNIC to give the domain to the them as a gift.
As thousands of people in China share the same name and spelling it will prove particularly hard to secure domain names, as recently reported by Beijing News that at least ten of the gold medalist’s names have already been registered before the Olympics.
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