China creates own domain names

China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has established a set of new top-level and second-level domain names, according to People's Daily Online, the Web site of the official People's Daily newspaper.

The new domain name system took effect as of Wednesday, according to the report. "It means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States," the report said.

The MII has temporarily set up Chinese versions of three existing top-level domain names: ".cn", ".com" and ".net", according to the report. China's top-level domain established through ICANN is ".cn" in Roman characters.