CYBERSPACE – Last week, the People’s Daily, one of the largest and most influential newspapers in China, ran an English-language article that announced changes to the country’s domain name system – changes that have some industry analysts concerned for the future of the Internet as an international mechanism.In the article, the People’s Daily reported that the new system will contain Chinese versions of existing .com, .net and .cn TLDs. “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 article noted.

American officials have said previously that China and other countries want to supplant ICANN’s control in order to censor political and religious speech on the internet, including websites and blogs run by political dissidents.

By setting up addresses that don’t rely on ICANN, some analysts say that China has begun the process of creating a “domestic internet” which will be much easier to police and censor than the current ICANN-administered Web.

Others see a less threatening impetus behind China’s development of their own domain system, however; perhaps the new policy is simply a desire to make the internet more accessible to Chinese speaking surfers.

Former Stanford University professor Subramanian Subbiah, co-founder of “I-DNS.net,” a Singapore-based company that sells domain names that incorporate non-western writing systems, told the Boston Globethat China has lost patience with ICANN, which has not yet made domain names available for non-western writing systems.

Subbiah doesn’t buy into the censorship concerns either, noting that the Chinese government already controls the ICANN-linked root servers inside China and they are actively censoring internet information as it stands.

“They’re doing it today; they’ll be doing it tomorrow,” Subbiah said.

Thus far, ICANN is reserving judgment on the new Chinese domains, with ICANN officials saying they need more time to confirm the accuracy of the news report and to “consult” with Chinese authorities.

In addition to the potential implications for censorship, and opening the possibility of innumerable Internet “fiefdoms” operated outside the auspices of ICANN, the new domain names raise the possibility of a rush to register Chinese-language versions of existing domains. Given the size of the Chinese market, businesses may jump at the chance to register Chinese versions of retail shopping sites, search engines and other types of portals.