UK has more domains than China

But Germany still beats us

There are now more UK internet domain names than Chinese, as registrants continue to abandon the .cn name-space in droves.

There were 8,254,681 .cn domains at the end of April, compared to 8,483,010 under .uk, according to the latest numbers compiled by HosterStats.com.

The shift is due to the massive reduction in .cn names, rather than a radical increase in the number of people registering UK addresses.

The .uk space has only grown by a few hundred thousand registrations since the start of the year, while .cn has shrunk by four million.

The huge drop-off in China is likely due to a combination of super-cheap .cn offers expiring and China's recent Draconian crackdown on registrants.

CNNIC, which runs .cn, now requires all registrants to provide photo ID before they can register a domain name. This move has already caused Western registrars, such as Go Daddy and Network Solutions, to stop accepting .cn orders.

Despite the shift in positions, the UK is only the second-largest country-code domain. Germany's .de currently has over 13.6 million registrations.