Just saw this post on Michael Geist’s blog:

Starting tomorrow, China’s Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As the People’s Daily Online notes this “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.” In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow. With it, the rules of the game may change as 110 million Internet users will suddenly have access to a competing dot-com (albeit in a different character set) and will no longer rely exclusively on ICANN for the resolution of Internet domain name queries.

Geist also has some good context and analysis of what this means. (Andy Oram also wrote a good backgrounder on the issues last October.) It will be interesting to see how things develop.