Individuals, enterprises and organisations will be allowed to decidethe fees for domain name registration, as the government is set to onlycharge fees for the use of domain names.

Under the previous system, the government had charged fees for domain name registrations and paid commissions to vendors.

Theannouncement was made by Deputy Minister of Information andCommunications Le Nam Thang. As reported on local technology pageICTnews.vn, the ministry will issue new mechanisms on fees for domainname registrations.

The Deputy Minister asked the Ministry'sVietnam Internet Network Information Centre (VNNIC) to cooperate withrelated authorities to research the management of domain names when thegovernment starts charging only for domain name usage.

"When thegovernment stops charging fees for domain name registrations, domainnames for sale will follow the market mechanism. The issue was addressedat various conferences in which the ministry participated in 2014,"Thang said.

According to statistics from VNNIC, more than 100,000new domain names ending in ."vn" were registered from the beginning of2014 to mid-December, raising its total number to more than 297,000.This was a 12.3 percent increase compared with figures from the sameperiod in 2013.

The domain name ."vn" ranked seventh among thetop 22 most registered national domain names in 2014, according to alist published by the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association.

RegardingVietnamese domain names, by the end of December 15, 2014, 83,330 newdomain names were registered, raising the country's total number to morethan 983,000 names. More than 17.5 percent of the total number wereactively used.-VNA