China has announced it is creating a new set of domain names based on Chinese characters.

China has created three of its own top-level domains that will use the domain names .cn, .com and .net, in Chinese. The domain names were launched Wednesday by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry.

The creation of Chinese character domain names has led to speculation that China could break away from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) completely, and undermine the global unity of the Domain Name System (DNS), the network of servers that resolves domain name requests.

"It means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of ICANN of the U.S.," reported the People's Daily Online, a Chinese government-approved publication.

more