【单选题】

Total web address registrations surged to 63 million in the spring of this year. Some 4.7 million new addresses were created in the first quarter, a recorD、Though NorthAmerica remained the area with the highest number of Internet users as a percentage of its population—at just over half—the recent availability ofArabic,Chinese, and Russian characters within domain names certainly contributed to this rapid increase. The "inter-connected world" of the Internet that online visionaries espouse is slowly taking shape.

However, not all reports have been gooD、E-mail has made business-to-business communication more efficient and person-to-person correspondence faster and cheaper, yet spare and e-mail viruses also reached an all-time high. Spare—unwanted e-mail—makes up three-quarters of all e-mail messages. Worse still, despite improvements in anti-virus software, the percentage of virus-infected e-mails remained at just over nine percent. For businesses, this is especially bad news, as they must purchase costly anti-virus software and take valuable time to delete the unwanted e-mails, which costs businesses an average of US$1,934 per year in lost production, double the amount of the previous year.
Although the Internet’s potential is great, the Internet industry should redouble its efforts to reduce unwanted and unnecessary spam and reduce the serious threats posed by software and Internet viruses.
In the article, the word "espouse" in paragraph 1, line 8, is closest in meaning to
A、support
B．require
C．reject
D．understand