As if Google hasn't had enough problems in China already, the People's Daily reports on Google's CN domain name problems:

"Gmail.cn", the domain name for Gmail in China, has been registered by a Beijing-based company instead. Gmail is a key product of Google. In fact, almost all the CN domain names for Google's such products have been registered by others.

Launching Gmail in April 2004, Google registered "gmail.com.cn". However, gmail.cn was registered by a Beijing-based company as early as in August 2003. Experts say, the time of the registration of "gmail.cn" was far earlier than the debut of Google's Gmail, so the possibility for the CN domain name to be recovered is rather slim unless the registration was vicious.

Months ago, Google recovered two domain names, i.e. "google.com.cn" and "google.cn" at high prices, but its troubles are far from this. It is shown at China Internet Network Information Center that the CN domain names for GoogleTalk, Google Earth, Googlelocal, etc. have all been registered by others.

Among the investor registers, there is the far-sighted such as a Guangdong-based company, who registered "googlelocal.cn" and "googlelocal.com.cn" in March 2004, far earlier than the one-week old GoogleLocal. There are also others who did it after the news on Google's redeeming the domain names with one million yuan was released. They registered "googlemap.cn" and "googleearth.cn". The time of the registration of "googletalk.cn" and "googletalk.com.cn" was along side with the official appearance of GoogleTalk.

It is really surprising that the registers could be so precise and fast.