Web registrar GoDaddy has said that it will stop registering domain names in China in protest at the growing amount of information required by the Chinese authorities.
Christine Jones, corporate secretary at GoDaddy, said at a congressional commission on China that the firm is concerned by changes being made to the information required from Chinese citizens when they sign up for a domain.
"A new policy effective 14 December required any registrants of .cn domain names to provide a colour headshot photo identification, business identification (including a Chinese business registration number) and signed registration forms," she said.
Jones explained that the Chinese authorities then asked GoDaddy to retrospectively gather this information on pre-existing owners of domains, and threatened those that did not comply with disconnection of their domains.
"For these reasons, we have decided to discontinue offering new .cn domain names at this time," she said.
Jones went on to criticise the Chinese authorities' approach to the management of the internet.
"We believe that many of the current abuses of the internet originating in China are due to a lack of enforcement against criminal activities by the Chinese government," she said.
"Our experience has been that China is focused on using the internet to monitor and control the legitimate activities of its citizens, rather than penalising those who commit internet-related crimes."
Jones claimed that, as a result, GoDaddy has had to repel a large number of attacks on the systems that host its customer web sites, including distributed denial-of-service attacks.
"We also combat many attacks that are more systematic, such as hackers attempting to insert malicious code into the pages of our customers' hosted web sites," she said.
Jones confirmed that existing .cn domains would not be affected by this announcement, but urged the US government to pressure China to change its stance on internet regulations.
"We hope that the US government can use its influence with the authorities in China to increase Chinese enforcement activities relating to internet abuse, while encouraging the free exchange of ideas, information and trade," she said.
The move follows confirmation from Google that it will move its Chinese search operation to Hong Kong, and speculation that Dell is considering closing its operations in China and relocating them to India.
Russia recently announced that it will tighten up its domain name registration policies to take on DNS scammers and cyber criminals operating in the region.
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