Why we love China so…

Lawrence Sheed // 22 Feb 2011 // Comments Off on Why we love China so…

Had a client ask about some .cn stuff over Skype, so proceeded to give him the whole this is what is needed now haha fun story
i.e but no, theres more, you also need this…. and this…. and this… and don’t forget the photo in front of the sign..

While we do have our own list of requirements in this blog, I did google to see if there was something less dry, and discovered a little blog post which mirrored our own experiences quite similarly. Its a good read too –

Read this http://www.candisgroup.com/blog/busdev/the-history-of-chinese-icp-and-cn-ownership-2, then follow on below, as this was intended to be posted as a comment on that post, but their blog comments appear to be borked at the moment.

I’ve fleshed it out a little, and it still seems semi relevant here.

Do remember that while anything I say can and will be used against me as evidence, I never said it. Got that? Good, now read on.
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Glad to see I wasn’t the only one that had to go through all that, and again in October last year.

I also fondly remember the shut down their site stuff.

First we made a ICP warning page, then a blank page, and then I got creative and started mapping the IP for the domain to the miibeian.gov.cn server – you never know, maybe they’ll shut down their site!

Apparently although this was amusing, it also wasn’t enough, and we too had to vanish the DNS into nothingness NOW
(which is also hard, as explaining that things take 1-2 days to propagate doesn’t seem to sink in with the telecom people)
Mind you, the threat from the terrori^H Telecom people to shut off their site didn’t really have the same effect when its already shut off dammit!

Then there are the clients who ask why do we have 4 icp addresses?
Well, because the government decided that you could only have 1 per login when we did them in 2005. However client just has 1 site, and they point .com .com.cn .cn et al to the same place. and Telecom INSISTS that you have an ICP for all of them, even though its the same site. Luckily they seem to have fixed that now, although we still have the odd site with 3 or 4 icp’s just because you can’t seem to get them to accept they’re all the same site dammit, just let us register them to the one ICP, please!

…and then there are the mysteriously disappearing ICP numbers of doooom, where the telecom people says that ICP is invalid. Its fake I tell you, FAKE!
Although you could swear that the ICP is real as you did all that darn paperwork the last time around, plus you have an email from miibeian which has that number, and domain, so please please recheck… but they still say thats impossible, it doesn’t exist in their system.
Why, why, why, would we possibly have a bazs.cert for the domain together with the icp and the url tucked away in our files if we didn’t receive it from them?, but no, we have to do it all again because their system is buggy, and these aren’t the droi^Hnumber’s you’re looking for.

At least they seem to have dropped that requirement now for the bazs.cert file to be uploaded to all sites now. I shouldn’t say that too loud though, someone up high will probably smack their head now, and say, I knew there was some other hoop we forgot to get people to jump through now, erm, I mean new legislation thats not clearly thought out so people have to work out the hard way what we want, er no, thats not right either, forget what I said…

Or the good old China optimistic scheduling / planning with regards to implementation dates?

i.e. You have 2 weeks to get all of your 700+ client registrations completed in triplicate, filed with CNNIC, registrar, and local telecom authority or we shut their site off…. What do you mean you need some kind of notice.
Jump NOW! We say how high.

Ah, the good old days.

At least the clients are understanding when you tell them hey, the government changed the rules again, we need more stuff, come for photos, bring your id’s, and business licences, and do it asap, or you lose the domain.

It’s at time like this when I think back to what should have been the slogan for the Shanghai expo and the thing with 5 circles up in Beijing (just prior to the big bonfire and marshmallows thing at the CCTV building that I didn’t get invited to).

China. – We invented bureaucracy.