internet - Thousands of unregistered websites face end-of-year axe

The Russian newswire Interfax reports that authorities have started to close down websites in China that have failed to register with the relevant authorities. The rules on registration date from early this year and another deadline, last summer, was extended after too many website were not registered.
As a part of their operation for example hosts of weblogs applied for a collective registration that covered all the weblogs they were hosting.
The story suggests that authorities started to close websites both in Shanghai and Beijing, although numbers were not available. They would possibly seal of ports of servers hosting non-registered sites, but that would also hit websites that would have registered. Much remains unclear and reports of websites going out of service over the past few days have not yet emerged.

"This is a national campaign," the Beijing Communication Administration official, who asked to remain anonymous, said.
However, none of the officials were willing to say how many websites had been shut in the crackdown, nor were they clear about how Chinese authorities were executing the closing of the unregistered websites.

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