BEIJING - China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) established a set of new top-level and second-level domain names which took effect on March 1, 2006, according to People's Daily Newspaper.
The MII has temporarily set up Chinese versions of three existing top-level domain names: ".cn," ".com" and ".net." China's top-level domain established through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is ".cn" in Roman characters. The MII also added two kinds of second-level domain names to the Romanized ".cn" top-level domain. One set of second-level domains will cover categories of institutions: ".ac" for research entities, ".edu" for educational institutions, ".gov" for government departments and ".mil" for defense departments.
The other set of second-level domain names will be for China's provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the central government, and special administrative regions. In most cases, domain names will be derived from Romanized spellings of the localities, such as ".bj" for Beijing and ".sh" for Shanghai.