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Internet users around the world will be able to register websites ending with".中国" (China) in their domain names starting in July, which experts believe will enhance the country's Internet penetration rate.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit international organization that manages worldwide distribution of top-level domain names, approved the application of China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) to use the Chinese domain name ".中国" on April 22, the Beijing Daily reported Thursday.
Such approval is considered the beginning of a new era for Internet development as multiple languages could be used as domain names, the report said.
CNNIC and other domain name registration companies will provide technology support in the next few months to promote the new domain name and currently any website that has already registered ".cn" domain names are entitled to register the new name, the CNNIC said.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced earlier that the number of Internet users in China surpassed 384 million in 2009, increasing by 80 million over 2008, China Radio International Online reported.
At the same time, Internet penetration in China is less than 30 percent, which is far behind some developed countries, such as the US and Japan, where Internet penetration has reached 70 percent.
The difficulty of using English letters to search websites may be one reason many Chinese speaking Internet users may embrace characters.
"Chinese speaking Internet users will be able to use their native language to surf the Internet soon," Qi Lin, spokesman of CNNIC, said at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday..
Qi said that Internet users could use both simplified Chinese characters and traditional Chinese characters with the ".中国" domain name to visit Chinese websites.
More than 90 percent of the Chinese government websites and 95 percent of Chinese news websites have already started using Chinese domain names as well as English domain names, the report said.