Last Jan, Google announced to withdraw its services from mainland China following a series of sophisticated and coordinated hacking attacks dubbed as Operation Aurora, which targeted human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. These attacks originated from China and hence dismayed the authorities at Google who threatened, saying that it could no longer censor its search results on the Chinese version of Google homepage Google.cn.

With China’s views on the Internet becoming ever more unpopular and harding with western companies, another Internet giant has also decided to halt it’s business in China. This time it’s world’s leading domain registrar, GoDaddy that has announced that it will stop registering .cn domains in China. GoDaddy decided to withdraw just a few days after Google announced to shutdown its servers in China.

Christine Jones, general counsel of the GoDaddy group described it in these words:

Their main concern is that the rules within China, that require customers to provide a greater amount of personal data, are being used to monitor and control the legitimate activities of its citizens

On the occasion of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Ms Jones said:

The intent of the procedures appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals.

China’s domain-name authority, the CNNIC, warned GoDaddy that if they did not start providing additional information such as; photo identification and physical signatures, the domain names would stop working. Which led to GoDaddy stopping the registering of new .cn domain names.   [Via Neowin]