On October 25 plenty of self-media accounts reported that IT news site cnBeta.com had its ICP filing revoked. I checked: it wasn’t resolving domestically, and it resolved to Cloudflare overseas. Like everyone else I guessed they were cancelling an individual filing to switch to a corporate one.
Today I looked again, and even the overseas resolution is gone. Checking the WHOIS, the domain has been placed under clientHold — halting resolution worldwide:
cnBeta’s ads have long been a sore point: pages stuffed with them, Baidu Union ads, Google AdSense, in-house ads. Half the page is advertising, and plenty of users keep asking — are they really that short on money?
A shutdown like this doesn’t come from a small mistake. With the domain itself set to clientHold, they clearly crossed a red line. Netizens speculate that this too came down to advertising — they played themselves to death. Rumor says one ad slot carried politically problematic content, which triggered the shutdown. Sounds quite plausible to me; ordinary mistakes don’t get your domain put under clientHold.
For anyone unfamiliar with clientHold: it’s a status set by the domain registrar. Once set, the domain stops resolving globally and can’t be transferred or modified — effectively frozen. Checking WHOIS, the registrar is 35.com, a domestic registrar, which can apply clientHold upon order from the relevant authorities.
I’d guess the webmaster has only one path to getting the domain back: filing a complaint with ICANN to force a transfer away from 35.com. Not that it helps much — even transferred out, it’d be blocked behind the Great Firewall, unusable with any domestic services.
Fellow webmasters: review your ad content carefully. Red lines are not to be crossed!