Well-known companies, including Google Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. are spending more to register Chinese online addresses as a new version of Internet Explorer helps search a company in Chinese more easily.

The program IE 7.0 will enable users to type Chinese characters in the address bar.

"This is a big potential market (for Chinese domain names), maybe valued at more than 10 million yuan (US$1.25 million) this year," said Liu Zhijiang, a senior official at China Internet Network Information Center, the country's domain name regulator.

Google, Coca-Cola, Disney and BMW have registered Chinese domain names, according to the center. Each Chinese domain name costs 280 yuan (US$35) per year.

The fee is small, but it is important. Firms have to pay much more to get back brand-related domain names which have been registered by others, industry insiders said.

Google, the world's most-used search engine, paid US$1 million for the domain names google.com.cn and google.cn when it started business in China, according to Yu Guofu, SAM Partners' lawyer, who was involved in Google's case then.

Google registered the Chinese domain name guge.cn (harvest song) in January, three months before it officially launched it. In December, Google also registered guge.cn (ancient song), according to the center's public domain name database.

The characters are different in each name, but are pronounced in the same way.

(Shanghai Daily April 22, 2006)