Stronger regulations and censorship of the Internet in China is causing a dip in the number of websites in the country.
Over one million websites shut down in the country in one year.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) has said that there has been a 41% drop in the number of websites in one year, with 1.91 million websites left at the end of last year.
China boasts of the world’s most populous Internet market, with over 450 million online users. It is the first time that country’s Web industry has seen a drop in the number of websites.
Experts believe tighter regulations, crackdown on porn and blocking sensitive forums have contributed to the decline.
China had already blocked popular websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but after the Jasmine revolution that swept the Arab world earlier this year, China has tightened its grip of the online industry in China.
The Telegraph quoted Wu Qiang, an Internet researcher at Tsinghua University, saying to the South China Morning Post, "The number of interactive websites, including online forums, has plummeted."
"The drop in numbers was effective in controlling speech. Online forums and bulletin boards are much less active than before."
However, the authors of the report at CASS said that it is untrue that websites were shut down by the government to control speech.
They maintained the recession and campaigns against Internet pornography and spam has caused websites to be shut down.
An editor of the report said, "China has a very high level of freedom of online speech."
"There have been very few cases where websites were shut down in recent years purely to control speech."
He also said that during the same period the number of Web pages had increased 79% to reach 60 billion.
"This means our content is getting stronger, while our supervision is getting more strict and more regulated," he said.
In May, Chinese pro-democracy activists, residing in New York, had sued Chinese search engine Baidu for violating the US constitution in a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.
The activists said that Baidu helps the government censor political expression. The suit also named the Chinese government as a defendant.
The same month, the Guardian reported that China had plugged loopholes in its Internet networks that allowed users to circumvent websites that are censored in the country.
The report said that China had cracked down on ‘virtual private network’ or VPN, which transmits encrypted data and is preferred by users to connect to websites, which are otherwise blocked.
Earlier this year, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had criticised the use of the Great Firewall.
She had also announced that the US would provide $19m of funding to increase efforts to work around Internet controls in China and other authoritarian states.
The new funding against Chinese firewalls will be part of the $30m which the US Congress allocated in the current fiscal year for Internet freedom.
Last week, there were rumours that China is trying to buy a significant stake in social networking site Facebook.
