Another news piece highlighting the interesting but bizarre tale of Internet use in China By: Keral Patel
 
The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) in China has announced sweeping reforms that will change the Internet domain system in China. The three top-level Chinese domain names under the “China” domain will now represent “Academics”, “Military”, and “Government”. All of these new domains will be accessible via Chinese characters.

Under the new system, besides “CN”, three Chinese TLD names “CN”, “COM” and “NET” are temporarily set. 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.

China has had rapid Internet growth over the past several years, with the country reportedly having upwards of 125 million Internet users. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for assigning and distributing official internet domains, was transferred from the US to the United Nations. In the past, ICANN’s stance on non-Romanized characters has been hostile at best. China’s move to promote its own domain system with Chinese characters is precedence for other countries to embrace their own writing system for domain names — Arabic and Korean domain brokers are already hammering out the details for natural language domains.