SHANGHAI, China -- Expanding its online presence, China will begin letting overseas websites use addresses with its "dot-cn" national suffix starting in December, a foreign company picked to sign up subscribers said Thursday.
The step gives foreign companies a new avenue to court China's fast-growing population of Internet users, adding to the communist government's campaign to exploit the Internet commercially.
China owns the dot-cn suffix under international rules governing the use of the Internet.
Until now, it allowed only Chinese entities or foreign companies with a substantial presence in China to use it. But in October, the government signed up an American company, NeuStar Registry, to offer it to foreigners.
"There is going to be a very high demand due to China's opening up" commercially, said Richard Tindal, NeuStar's vice president for sales and marketing. He was in Shanghai for a conference of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the body that oversees Internet addresses.
Opening up a country's domain name to foreigners is not uncommon. Some tiny countries offer domains such as dot-tv for worldwide sale as revenue generators.
A Chinese agency is to decide which addresses are appropriate and check the content of dot-cn sites, according to Tindal. Communist authorities are very sensitive about political content and bar Chinese Web surfers from seeing a wide range of foreign sites run by news organizations, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents.
Tindal wouldn't discuss fees for registering a dot-cn address.
In the seven years since it was first offered, dot-cn had attracted fewer than 130,000 subscribers, tiny for a nation of 1.3 billion people.
By comparison, Tindal said NeuStar signed up 400,000 subscribers for the United States' dot-us suffix in a couple of months. NeuStar also offers the global dot-biz domain name, one of seven newly created by ICANN in 2000.
