Now, more than 700 million individuals have access to the Internet in China, more than any nation on earth.

The statement comes ahead of an anticipated hearing by a Senate Commerce Committee on a strategy for stopping U.S. supervision of essential technical Internet functions in favor of a world-wide multi-stakeholder governance model.

Some of them dictatorial, issue that management of the Internet could pass to authorities, has caused postponements and reluctance over the strategy.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions, including duty for the coordination of the DNS (Domain Name System) origin, IP addressing, and other Net protocol resources, are managed by ICANN under contract with the Department of Commerce. ICANN submitted in March to the U.S. its strategy for the transition.

The draft Internet domain name regulations, released in March by the Chinese authorities, would require all Internet domain names in China to be filed through government-authorized service providers that have a presence in the state, besides imposing additional regulations on the supply of domain name services.

The move seems to be in line with the objective of China’s authorities to have greater control over the national Internet. The state already censors a lot of websites in the state besides blocking U.S. sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The focus of issue of the two U.S. officials is a vaguely-defined new post 37, which has been interpreted as ban Internet Service Providers in China from supplying Internet access to domain names that are filed with a registrar abroad, thus cutting off China’s Internet from the remainder of the world.

“While Chinese authorities have clarified the purpose of the post would be to forbid access to Chinese-registered domain names that are obtained from registries/registrars which are not in conformity with Chinese regulations, issues remain that the language in its present form is obscure and open to differing interpretations,” according to the statement.

Critics of the draft rules are also opposed to demands for actual name verification and forced info localization for the registration of Internet addresses.