Chinese, Japanese, Korean Dot-Com Names Accepted

The master keeper of dot-com names began accepting non-English characters Thursday (November 9) evening as the next step in making the World Wide Web truly global.

VeriSign Global Registry Services, the company in charge of Internet domain names ending in .com, .net and .org, is initially accepting Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters for those suffixes, and indicates that Arabic and other languages might follow the case, according to a report from the company.

Two dozen companies were authorized to take orders and submit them to VeriSign's database. Many companies offered translation services with some for an extra charge. Registrations began at 7 p.m. Eastern, or midnight Greenwich Mean Time.

Web addresses are now limited to the 26 letters of the English alphabet, 10 numerals and a hyphen - 37 characters in all. The addition of Asian character sets brings the total to 40,282 and could boost Internet usage abroad.

Web surfers whose keyboards are set for English characters will need to modify their computers' settings - adding character sets for other languages - in order to input non-English Internet addresses.

Many computers sold outside the United States are already set up to be able to create characters in those languages.

Richard Forman, chief executive at Register.com, said an Asian company might want a site in its native language, while US firms might want one in all languages with which they do business.

Sites will not be able to use the new names for at least another month, and even then the program is officially a test.

VeriSign reserves the right to make changes or cancel registrations that are incompatible with future standards.

Critics cautioned that efforts like VeriSign's are premature because the Internet still lacks standards for non-English characters.

Computers on the Internet that help users find Web sites were programmed with English in mind, and the engineers who try to keep order on the Net hold that many of those machines will not understand new languages without software upgrades. They say tens of thousands of such machines, known as domain name servers, need to be updated.



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