China blocks access to all .tk domains (Score 1)

I was surprised to read about China blocking Google...and was looking around the Net for other Chinese censorship. Anyone hear about this one? I came across a Press Release about China beating up on a little Island in the South Pacific called Tokelau. I ended up emailing back and forth with a Rep. at the Registry (called DOT TK) and am told that the situation is still unresolved. They have no news from the Chinese on why they did it or if it will ever reverse the block.

Could it be, as the DOT TK Rep speculated...that because they offer free ccTLD domains and within just a few months from the time they introduced the service, they had registered 250,000 domains, 60,000 of them by Chinese citizens (more than double the number of domains for Chinese citizens than the country has registered for its own .CN domains)...that .tk represented some sort of Internet territorial threat?

If anyone thinks they know why the Chinese blocked all .tk domains, or can find out, I would be really interested to hear.

Their site is http://www.dot.tk.

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the Press Release. The whole release can be found at:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020625/phtu016_1.html

Largest Country in the World Blocks Internet Access to Websites Of One of the Smallest Countries in the World,
Announces Dot TK

The islands of Tokelau, with just 1500 inhabitants, consisting of three little atolls in the South Pacific Ocean face a ban from the largest country in the world: the Peoples Republic of China.

China's Data Communication Bureau, residing at the Ministry of Information Industry, has blocked access to all websites bearing a .TK domain name. Many years ago, the International Standard Organization assigned Tokelau their .TK extension, just as .DE is assigned to Germany and .JP to Japan. Tokelau accepts registrations from all over the world. That's why the registry is larger than countries like Sweden or Russia.

Currently there are more then 220,000 websites containing a .TK domain name, which are not reachable by any Chinese individual or company.

The reason why the Data Communication Bureau blocked access to the .TK websites is unknown. Taloha tried to contact the Ministry of Information Industry several times in the last couple of weeks, but without success. The content displayed on the 60,000 Chinese websites, registered with a .TK domain name, varies from search engines to vacation-photo collections.

More information about Dot TK and the Islands of Tokelau can be found on www.dot.tk.