China on track to outnumber US's net users

China is expected to overtake the United States within two years as the nation with the most Internet users, because the estimated number of nation’s Web users has expanded by 23.4 percent last year to 137 million people, the China Internet Network Information centre (CNNIC) reported Wednesday on its website.

The surge in China’s Internet users’ population, which is about 10 percent of its 1.3 billion population, was estimated after interviewing the 32,325 Chinese on telephone, and only those who were above the age of six and use the Internet for at least one hour a week on average were considered as Internet users, said the CNNIC, a quasi-government organization.

"We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the United States,” said Wang Enhai, an official of the state-run agency. "We are expecting even faster growth in 2007 and 2008 given that internet penetration now has exceeded 10.5 percent in the country," Wang added.

Online services like e-mail, search engines, e-commerce, blogs, online news and games saw rapid development, while new technologies had brought new opportunities for the development of the Internet, Minister of Information Industry Wang Xudong has said.

As per the US government data, nearly 210 million of the United States' 300 million people are using net, and the Chinese agency hopes that China’s online users’ population would reach 210 millions in two years if it keeps up a 24 percent annual growth rate.

Since a peak of 75.4 percent in 2002, the growth in China's Internet population, though, has gradually lessened, the growth rate was 18.2 percent and 18.1 percent in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

According to the CNNIC, China had 111 million Internet users in January 2006, of which 104 million or 75.9% of all Internet users were broadband users, while about 17 millions or 12.4% of the Internet population went online via mobile phones, showing strong growth in wireless Internet use.

The rapidly changing mobile lifestyle in China could help the Internet industry surge higher, CNNIC director Mao Wei anticipates.

Mao Wei expects that people in China would likely witness a bigger boom in Internet market once the country rolls out 3G (third generation) mobile telephony that promises faster Internet access and downloads of data-heavy services such as videos.

China had 461 million mobile telephone users at the end of 2006, as per the statistics released by the Ministry of Information Industry, on Monday.

Although the Chinese government, dominated by the communists, encourages Internet use, but at the same time it puts some restrictions on the net usage. For instance, net can be used for education and business purposes but no one can use the net for posting political essays.

China's internet police have blocked hundreds of websites that were adjudged politically sensitive, and nabbed dozens of people for posting such material authorities consider subversive or obscene.