The arrival of the handover will be a sad day for Internet-heads who hoped to make a killing by speculating on 1997-related Internet names.
About two years ago local Web entrepreneurs started grabbing names with permutations of 'hongkong', 'hong-kong', '97', 'china' and other handover-related words, ending in .com, .net and .org.
Dozens were taken, each costing US$100 (HK$774) to register.
In general, the rule with Internet names is that the first person who wants it can have it.
They hoped that when big firms set up their handover Web sites they would have to buy them back for big money or suffer an obscure name for their site - the latest hi-tech speculation game.
But there are so many permutations of the key words that firms wanting a snappy name have had no problem finding an unclaimed one.