Website approval in China

It is better to register your website, be it commercial or personal, with the cyber police. This is not something that is necessary – the website will function without it if you have previously received an ICP. This will not affect the ranking in search results, the linking to various services like CDN, online payments, etc. Still, it’s worth doing it for two simple reasons:

1. it will help a lot when the website gets in trouble. For example, your former employee with access to the registrar’s admin panel hijacked your domain. Or you forgot to pay for it and fell victim to the squatters. You can’t predict everything that comes out of the blue, but al least you can cushion the blow
2. without registration, it is impossible to obtain licenses for certain types of activities on the Internet – for example, regarding products subject to regulation
3. you can enable “protection for small and medium websites” – something like a firewall package + protection against DDOS + spam filter supplied by the police

And besides, it is never superfluous to play safe. Moreover, everything is done simply, quickly and free of charge.

For starters, don’t confuse ICP with registration. ICP, should we draw analogies, is control over the fact that you carry out activities within the scope indicated in the business license, submit reports, etc. As for the registration, they do not care what exactly you do on the website, the main thing is that it is not illegal in terms of using the website as a tool for committing crimes.

So, you go to the registration website, create an account and fill in your company information.

As you can see, it is quite possible to indicate a foreigner as a responsible person and upload a passport as a supporting document. After sending the information for consideration, you can immediately start filling out an application for registering the website.

Here, a couple of items are a little unclear, I will focus on each of them:

1. certificate for the domain – it is downloaded from the admin panel of your registrar as a picture
2. hosting and registrar – here you will need to look up in which province and city they are registered. For example, in our case (Aliyun) I selected “Zhejiang” province, “Hangzhou” city and selected Aliyun company from the drop-down list. In the case of Tencent, for instance, you will need to select the province of “Guangdong” along with the city of “Shenzhen”

In fact, the rest of items are quite intelligible. Fill out the remaining items about the scope of activity, the language of the site, add (if necessary) a particular person responsible for this very site (if not required, check the box “matches the information entered earlier”) and send it for consideration.

And after about a week, you will receive a message that everything is successful.

 That’s it, now copy the registration number and paste it along with the picture into the footer of the website.