SHANGHAI, Mar. 8 -- China's top Internet address registration agency has slashed the price of domain names ending with .cn to win users from the ".com" service, whose server is overseas.

The China Internet Network Information Center, or CNNIC, said the promotion is for the sake of national information security and to increase Internet use in the world's second-largest Web market.

"Wider use of the .cn service will improve our Internet independency and it's safer for Chinese Website operators," said government-backed CNNIC in a statement yesterday.

China had 4.1 million domain names by the end of 2006. Nearly half of them ended with .com that depend on servers in the United States, while 44 percent were using the .cn service. The rest were mostly .net and .org sites, according to CNNIC's annual report.

The overseas server-backed .com service was disrupted in the last week of December when earthquakes off southern Taiwan knocked out undersea cables.

Though Internet access improved later as telcos initiated back-up routes, overseas connections are still jammed. Thousands of Chinese Websites lost their domain names.

The .com service is mostly booked through domain name registration agencies authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers at an annual fee of several hundred yuan.

The promotion by CNNIC, backed by the Ministry of Information Industry, charges only one yuan (13 US cents) a year for registration per domain name, which is confined to English names ending with .cn.