China executed people for being involved in a non-violent protest. And then they sent bills home to the relatives of the deceased for the cost of the bullets.
In that context, this sort of thing should not be the least surprising.
I'm aware of that, i just didn't expect them to care about domain registrations when they can persecute the individual site owners. But i guess that that way there will be less work for them to do.
Taxes don't work quite the same as the U.S. Taxes in China for the most part are pay as you go. Payroll taxes work pretty much the same as U.S. but there is no 1040 to file each year.
As to the bullet billing, I do know a bit about that. Its something they still do and is mostly to make a social point. I have no idea if anyone actually pays and doubt there is punishment for not doing so. But no, its not tax deductible as your income was already taxed when you received your income.
I thought this was pretty standard for some country specific TLDs. I looked up Ireland's rules once and it seemed as though I couldn't get a domain name since I wasn't a business in Ireland.
(I guess this has resently changed per wikipedia:
"Registration policies have been liberalised somewhat in recent years and rules such as the one against registering generic domain names have been dropped. Applicants for .ie domain names still have to provide proof of entitlement to the domain that they want to register."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ie)
As far as i remember, the .it domain was also limited to businesses until 1999, what we see in China is something going in the opposite direction, sadly.
I am not sure if it is backwards, but maybe resetting. I think China is one of those unfortunate countries that is trying to find themselves after the world norms have been already developed. It seems that a lot of their issues are getting noticed now, but many developed countries did the same thing, just under less notice.
