Improving E-Government Services Should Start with Domain Names: A Longitudinal Study of Chinese E-Government Domain Names

As a part of the ongoing examination of the myriad issues related to the rapid development of Chinese electronic government (e-government), this paper focuses specifically on whether the Chinese e-government domain names comply with the China Government Domain Name Standard (the Standard) in November 2005 and 2006. This research found that China local governments are using various types of domain names and only around 60% of the examined domain names fully comply with the Standard in both the two examinations. The consequences of this issue together with how to address it are discussed in this paper. In addition, the possibility to use domain names in Chinese characters as government domain names is discussed.