Yesterday we looked at the popularity of the Chinese character TLD for Singapore Internet domains. Today we’re going to examine the Chinese character ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) for those places that use Chinese characters and compare the figures with those for the respective Roman alphabet TLDs.
In other words, how, for example, does the use of 
domains compare with the use of .tw domains?
Since, unlike the case with Singapore, I don’t have the registration figures, I’m having to make do with Google hits, which is a different measure. For this purpose, Google is unfortunately a bit of a blunt instrument. But at least it should be a fairly evenhanded blunt instrument and will be useful in establishing baselines for later comparisons.
A few notes before we get started:
- Japan has yet to bother with completing the process for its own name in kanji (
), so it is omitted here. - Macau only recently asked for
and 
, so those figures are still at zero. - Oddly enough, there’s no
ccTLD, even though the Ma administration, which was in power when Taiwan’s ccTLDs went into effect, officially prefers the more complex form of to — not to mention prefering it to 
.
| Google Hits | Percent of Total | |
|---|---|---|
| MACAU | ||
| .mo | 18400000 | 100.00 |
|
|
0 | 0.00 |
|
|
0 | 0.00 |
| TAIWAN | ||
| .tw | 206000000 | 99.86 |
|
|
67600 | 0.03 |
|
|
0 | 0.00 |
|
|
230000 | 0.11 |
| HONG KONG | ||
| .hk | 193000000 | 99.94 |
|
118000 | 0.06 |
| SINGAPORE | ||
| .sg | 97800000 | 100.00 |
|
2 | 0.00 |
| CHINA | ||
| .cn | 315000000 | 99.61 |
|
973000 | 0.31 |
|
251000 | 0.08 |
So in no instance does the Chinese character ccTLD reach even one half of one percent of the total for any given place.
Here are the results in a chart.
Note that the ratio of simplified:traditional forms in China and Taiwan are roughly mirror images of each other, as is perhaps to be expected.
See also Platform on Tai, Pinyin News, December 30, 2011
) as a top-level Internet domain (TLD), many in that multilingual society might jump at the chance to pick up some domain names ending with “Singapore” in Chinese characters. (Oh, it hurts me to use images instead of real text there; but until I get the hack fixed, that’s what I’m stuck with.) 
